External Access: Connecting through a Bastion? Here's why PAM is your friend

Maintain a relationship of mutual confidence with your customers and colleagues.

Make your work tangible

Despite this pressure, establishing a relationship of mutual confidence while working remotely can be simple if you are willing to follow some basic best practices:

• Ensure that only a limited number of people can access servers. This can mean that some team members can’t access certain servers, but instead have the means to audit
• Comply with regulations and security policies, especially if you are managing critical resources or manipulating sensitive data. These policies drastically reduce system vulnerabilities even when open to remote access, ensuring business continuity and productivity
• Take responsibility for your actions and be ready to demonstrate the accuracy of your operations. Proper tools can save you an infinite amount of time by illustrating exactly what actions you took on a system, which is obviously more efficient than a long explanation.

Keep It Simple Stupid: Ask for a Bastion!

A PAM solution, or a Bastion, can easily help you to implement these recommendations. Controlled privileged access helps you build strong relationships and work efficiently in any IT infrastructure and from anywhere.

• A Bastion compartmentalizes users, authorization, and target systems to ensure that only the right user can reach the right target with appropriate permissions. This way, no third-party user will be able to access your systems and take unauthorized actions.
• PAM solutions also have audit capabilities to record every session, search the recordings, or to view them in real-time. It then becomes simple to justify your actions on a system and avoid long and difficult discussions about what has been done and why.
• A Bastion should also provide best-in-class security algorithms and protection capabilities such as password rotation, isolation of targets from users, etc.

On top of the benefits to your credibility and effectiveness of your work, there are even more advantages to using a Bastion solution as an external or remote IT service provider. You should consider that a proper privileged access management system will just make your job easier than ever:

• One unique login credential to access the Bastion that grants you access to all the resources you are entitled to manage.
• No more issues with security: The PAM solution provides you with a secure external connection through an HTTPS portal, for example.
• And last but not least, none of this comes at the expense of usability. A proper Bastion allows you to connect seamlessly to your target, without changing your routine or forcing you to switch to new connection tools.

Systems administration and maintenance are all too often overlooked or considered to be risky tasks. And when several people can access the same system, it becomes difficult to sort out what has been done and to guarantee that a local admin didn’t try his/her own settings. As an external provider, you need to protect yourself and your infrastructure with solid IT security practices to ensure your work is documented, audited, and efficient.

Requesting remote access to systems through a Bastion system like WALLIX’s PAM solution is the most efficient and transparent way to demonstrate your accountability and to maintain relationships built on trust.