Here are some PAM best practices from BeyondTrust:

Discover and inventory all privileged accounts and assets. Organizations should perform continuous discovery and inventory of everything from privileged accounts to container instances and libraries across physical, virtual and cloud environments. This ensures only properly configured and approved images are available and used in an organization's cloud and DevOps environment.
Scan for vulnerabilities and configuration compliance. For DevOps and cloud use cases, organizations should scan both online and offline container instances and libraries for image integrity. This will help securely facilitate a move to DevOps or cloud by improving.
Manage shared secrets and hard-coded passwords. "Governing and controlling shared and other privileged accounts represents one of the most important tactics organizations can employ to limit the effects of data breaches resulting from NGT," the report said. Examples of shared secrets include developer access to source control, DevOps tools, test servers, and production builds.
Enforce least privilege and appropriate credential usage. Organizations should only grant required permissions to appropriate build machines and images through least privilege enforcement. This requires first eliminating administrator privileges on end-user machines, securely storing privileged account credentials, establishing a workflow process for check-out, and monitoring privileged sessions.
Segment networks. Especially important in DevOps, lateral movement protection should be zone-based and needs to cover the movement between development, quality assurance, and production systems.

Next Steps: "Foundational security layers and best practices discussed in this study are just as valid for next-generation IT as they are today," the report proclaimed. "In fact, they're even more valid with the added complexity and pace of change. Organizations interested in securing NGTs must implement these best practices as soon as possible. It's much easier to plan and proactively secure these initiatives before the migration of workloads and services begin."

Instant Insights /

5 Best Practices for Securing Next Gen Tech

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