Securing all access: an unquestionable duty of every company

April 2025

In a world where digital transformation has become the norm, protecting access to IT infrastructure is no longer optional. It’s essential for maintaining operations, staying compliant, and driving innovation.

The pandemic acted as a catalyst, fast-tracking digital initiatives across every industry. Telework became standard. Cloud services exploded. Mobile devices multiplied. But these same enablers of agility have drastically increased the number of access points into corporate systems—each one a potential entry for cybercriminals.

And attackers are keeping pace. In 2021 alone, 40 billion pieces of personal data were compromised—a staggering 78% increase from the year before. Today, cybercrime has evolved into a fully industrialized economy, operating with the efficiency of enterprise organizations and the audacity of nation-states.

Its cost? An estimated $10.5 trillion globally by 2025.

These losses aren’t limited to stolen data—they span business downtime, fraud, intellectual property theft, regulatory penalties, and brand damage. In this environment, securing access isn’t just about IT. It’s about safeguarding your business, your people, and your future.

Security no longer exists, only the right protection.

We now live in a paradigm shift era where there is no longer security at the perimeter, where users — be they people or machines — are increasingly mobile and need to access organizations’ data at any time and from anywhere. Data itself is becoming ephemeral (cloud storage, SaaS solutions, automation) to control costs and gain flexibility. This applies to all sectors, including the most critical such as healthcare, industry, or government, which urgently need to protect this access to ensure business continuity, regulatory compliance and, even more importantly, data accessibility, which in turn enables innovation and strengthens economic competitiveness.

To protect access, companies should implement measures such as the following:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) to neutralize the risks associated with compromised credentials.
• Remote access management, based on the latest security technologies, as this maintains remote access for suppliers, employees, or third-party administrators.
• Session management to monitor, track, and audit sessions.
• Password management to secure and rotate passwords and keys, as well as removing hard passwords.
• And finally, least privilege management to grant the right privileges to the right user at the right time and to stop the spread of malware by blocking lateral and vertical movement.

Integrated solutions for the best possible protection

WALLIX combines these measures into a single solution called WALLIX PAM. It helps companies to quickly implement a Zero Trust architecture with strong authentication and access control tailored to users, whether human or machine, depending on the task they need to perform and for a given period (Just-In-Time). It is also important that security managers have a constant overview of the activities occurring on the corporate network so that they can intervene quickly in the event of advanced threats or even malware. Strong authentication must be implemented, privilege elevations controlled, lateral movements blocked, and local administrator rights removed. Accounts, keys, and certificates need to be secured, for automation and DevOps practices. These DevOps environments should be secured in this way, regardless of the type of automation platform used and without exposing credentials (no hard coding). Access control policies ensure that appropriate levels of privileges are granted and considering best practices for password rotation, procedures can be defined without disrupting internal work processes.

Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to protect all access, not just privileged accounts. The principle of least privilege protects all vulnerable users and workstations in an organization. All employees at some point in their working day use some form of privilege to access certain internal resources. The challenge is to grant access at the right time with the right level of privileges to complete the expected task, regardless of where it is needed:

• For all users: whether they are employees, suppliers, partners, individuals, or machines, etc.
• For all types of situations.
• On all corporate strategic resources.
• On all the company’s devices.