How to Secure Your IT Admins

Hello, I'm Jeff Carpenter with Delinea, and today I'm going to be talking about securing your IT admins. Now, if your environment looks like most, you have IT admins, right? And your picture of privilege looks like this. You have network admins, you have infrastructure admins, you have application admins and people that have like helpdesk admin titles and like that. 

But as we move down this spectrum here, picture of privilege gets a little bit, how shall we say, cloudier, right? As we have cloud admins, and we're in a lot of cases, we're in multi-cloud environments, so we have Google, we have Amazon Web Services, we have Microsoft Azure, and we have a whole bunch of people with privilege operating in those clouds in development environments. 

Very highly sensitive environments, and they don't typically have the title. That has admin in it, but in fact, they're spinning up new virtual servers. They're deploying containers, they're creating new users and accounts. So, in fact, they are admins. And what the first step, what we say at Delinea here is you must get a picture of privilege across your environment here. 

So, the first thing that's required is discovery. Discovery of who all these admins are, how they got that privilege. What exactly they have their privilege, you know what, what do they have access to? And essentially figure out, you know, what is the worst-case scenario if one of these admins here gets compromised or gets here, gets compromised. 

And this needs to be done on a continuous basis. because right now a lot of organizations are spending a lot of time putting together Excel spreadsheets, putting things in Confluence. By the time those things are put together, they're already obsolete and they won't pass an audit. So, you need constant visibility, constant discovery, and inventorying of all of these admins. 

So, once you have that full picture, now you can start securing those admins here. And here's a nice lock here because. Once you have, what does Peter Drucker say? If you, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Well now you have this full picture of privilege across your organization. Now we can start securing that organization, these admins here, and we can do that using, you know, our, our vaulting. 

Putting their credentials in a vault, having them check out those credentials, multi-factor authentication. Now we can monitor sessions. Now we can record sessions for playback and we can use artificial intelligence AI to scan those sessions and look for anomalies. Look for potentially a compromised admin and a session where, they're doing something they shouldn't. 

Next up on the list here is meeting the business needs. We hear this constantly as, as a challenge for IT admins is, hey, we have a user that wants to be an admin for this SaaS application. We have all this activity going on in our cloud out here. How can we as an IT team support the needs of the business and do so on an ongoing basis, consistent across the organization? 

Making sure that anybody with an admin privilege that could potentially be compromised and cause damage to the organization, that they're, we're following consistent policies. So being able to support the business needs means being able to support those policies across the organization regardless of where those users are at. 

Even in cloud admins, that there are no standing privileges. And that sessions are checked out just in time or JIT. JIT is what we call it here, and they, that those standing privileges are not there. And then lastly, the seesaw, right? Security and convenience. With one click, any admin in the organization can request, and then based on their status and, and based on various policies. 

You can say yes that user should have that credential. They can check out that credential, start a session. The session can be audited, it can be monitored. Multi-factor authentication can be applied so you're not having any admin credentials exposed to the internet or any admins that are not operating outside of policy using static passwords, et cetera, or passwords stored in a, in a browser. 

So you can make sure that all of this security and convenience. Is available to all the admins across the organization. Just one click, check out that session. No standing privileges, and it is better able to support the business, better able to secure the business and have full visibility anytime. You want so you can pass audits, report up to your board that you can see all your privilege across the organization. 

And that is how we do it at Delinea and what we offer organizations with the Delinea platform, cloud native, always up zero downtime platform. I'm Jeff Carpenter, thanks for watching. And check out Delinea.com for more information.