Three tips for managing admin access to your cloud-hosted servers

As companies’ workloads increasingly move to the cloud, new security concerns arise. Chief among these is making sure your company is prepared to manage access to the sensitive data that resides in the cloud.

Traditional privileged access management solutions (PAM) are expensive, and they’re too slow for onboarding and offboarding in multi-cloud environments. Instead, companies need a lean, scalable access management solution that can keep up with the demands of cloud. Here are three things to keep in mind when planning admin access to your cloud-hosted servers.

Can your access management scale along with your cloud deployment?

Traditional PAM aren’t designed to scale at the speed of business, especially when that business is relying on cloud-based resources. They can take months to implement, and there are few things more frustrating for developers than having to wait for access to resources they need. Often, cloud instances are enrolled and decommissioned every day. A scalable access management solution that’s able to automatically on- and off-board hosts, plus add instances as your needs grow, will help keep your administrators and your developers happy. 

How will you coordinate access among your cloud environments?

AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and OpenStack all have their own access management consoles. When your organization is operating in a multi-cloud environment, dealing with multiple separate access consoles can quickly become challenging. Using multiple systems to access a resource would be frustrating for your developers. And your IT managers would need to handle multiple registries with duplicate information.

PrivX, the lean agile privileged access management solution for multi-cloud environments, is able to control and consolidate access to workloads whether they’re in AWS, GCP or Azure cloud environments, or all three, as well as private cloud and on-premise environments. It’s all accessible from a single user interface, providing visibility into the whole environment and making it easy to manage.

Better yet, you can set it and forget it. PrivX stays in sync and automatically discovers new hosts, along with any changes in your host environments, freeing up time and resources for your teams to work on what they do best.

Is cloud access synchronized with your identity management system?

Your team is dynamic: At any given moment, you may be dealing with employees joining, employees departing, temp workers and third-party contractors. When the roles of your team members change, access needs change, too. That’s why you need an access management solution that can interface with your identity management system.

Automation is your friend here. A solution that can automatically pull user identities from your IAM allows you to handle changes in access needs instantly, eliminating the delays that irk developers. Automatic integration of your lean PAM with your IAM helps save time and effort, linking the HR process with the IT process to expedite access.

Moving your workload to the cloud requires lots of planning around security and access issues. By answering these three questions, organizations can get a head start on the kinds of issues that create security risk and frustrate developers.

Want to learn more about how lean PAM works? Click here!

PS. Alternatively, you can sign up for the PrivX test drive – it doesn't cost you anything and it’s the full product in a browser!