Enterprises often rely on third-party vendors to carry out tasks that are beyond their internal capabilities. These third-party vendors often need privileged access to perform their tasks, which is typically granted through dedicated accounts that have access to an organizations confidential data. These accounts, given their volatility and elevated privileges, require secure third party access controls.
Securing these accounts means enforcing zero trust principles, and ensuring only the least privileges required are provided. Vendor access management allows an organization to streamline and secure the onboarding, monitoring, and offboarding of third-party vendors.
Outsourcing tasks is a cost efficient and effective way to address an organizations needs, but it raises several security concerns, as the vendors may need access to privileged resources. The vendors are given accounts with elevated privileges, increasing the surface for potential attacks, and creating opportunities for unauthorized access, or compliance violations if they are not managed properly.
A major reason these security concerns exist, is a lack of implementation of a Privileged Access Management (PAM) strategy, and the use of conventional methods of vendor access management. An instance of this, is where the vendors are given the actual password to the account or endpoint. This could lead to issues like credential sharing, dormant accounts with standing privileges, and privilege abuse.
Another major cause for concern is vendor access management is performed manually every time. This increases the scope for human error, while also being more time consuming. These errors are unaffordable when it comes to vital security functions like password rotation, privilege elevation, session management etc.
Organizations often aim to meet industry standards and policies like ISO 2700, SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR , which require monitoring and control of third-party activities. Employing a tool that facilitates third-party vendor access management not only streamlines the security process but also helps with compliance to these standards.
The lifecycle of a third-party vendor in an organization comprises of 3 key phases - onboarding, monitoring and offboarding. Let's explore how to manage each phase effectively.
The onboarding process begins with creating vendor profiles and assigning roles through role-based access controls, which specifies the resources the accounts can access, based on their function.
Once the third-party vendors are registered within an organization, it is ensured that their default state has zero standing privileges. Once the onboarding process is completed, the privileges they require to complete the task are documented.
After being successfully onboarded, the vendors can view the account assigned to them, that is available for request. These accounts by default have zero standing privileges, and are elevated to match the access levels required for the vendors task. Through a tool that enables vendor access management, the vendors submit an access request to the admin, specifying the reason and duration for which they require access.
The admin then decides whether to approve or reject the request.
Administrative supervision, however, does not end with access allocation. It also extends to vendor session management, actively monitoring and also recording the session for future audits and reviews. If the vendors activity is uncharacteristic to their function such as deletion of files, movement of data, or they attempt to move vertically across the network, the admin can manually flag the activity and close the session immediately, preventing any misuse of access.
Once the vendor completes their task, or the duration which they requested access for elapses, the session is closed, and their account is returned to its default state after checking in the credentials to the protected server.
The third-party vendor offboarding process starts once the task is finished, and the vendor has checked in the credentials. Once the process is triggered, the first step is to lock the vendors account. Following this, all the credentials and passwords which the vendor had access to are rotated, ensuring that no standing privileges remain, and that security breaches like credential sharing or unauthorized access does not occur.
Along with revoking access, any assets associated with the third-party vendors account must be recovered, and transferred to an administrator, or an IT staff. Then finally, the vendors account is deleted and the vendor is removed from the enterprise's workflow, completing the offboarding process.
Granular access control use role based access management to ensure vendors can only access the specific resources required for the task at hand. This minimizes risks associated with elevated accounts, and enforces least privileges.
To reduce the risk of privilege abuse by third-party vendors, access to these privileged resources should be restricted to the duration required by the vendor to perform their task. Solutions like a PAM tool streamline vendor access management by integrating access requests, approval and revocation into the workflow. This ensures that vendor access is granted just in time to perform an action, and revoked immediately on completion.
Organizations often have dedicated accounts for third party vendors, to which vendors are granted access, just in time for their tasks. The credentials to these shared and brokered accounts must be stored in a central secured vault. The passwords to these accounts must also be rotated after every use, to prevent credential sharing and privilege abuse.
While VPNs have been commonly used to grant a vendor remote access to an organizations systems, they also pose significant security risks due to their broad access levels, and limited transparency. Remote Access Gateways offer a secure alternative, by restricting vendor sessions to specific resources. This helps secure remote vendor access, and increases an organizations control over its remote connections.
Once vendor access is granted, sessions must be continuously monitored, and immediately closed if suspicious activity is detected. These sessions must also be recorded for auditing and security purposes.
PAM360 delivers full lifecycle oversight for third-party vendors, from onboarding, access provisioning, and remote access, to real time monitoring and offboarding. The core capabilities of PAM360 to provide streamlined vendor access management workflows are:
Granting vendors privileged access manually is time consuming, and risky. PAM360 replaces this laborious process with automated workflows, that define who can access what, when, and for how long.
Every vendor session is a potential risk. PAM360 records vendor activity, be it remote or on-site, allowing sessions to be monitored live, or replayed later. Session monitoring doesn't just deter misuse, it also simplifies auditing and investigation.
PAM360 integrates seamlessly with existing tools, making it possible to onboard, process and offboard third-party vendors without disrupting the workflow. Whether they login using RDP or SSH sessions, vendors can be authenticated in a secure manner, and limited to the resources they require.