ARCON Privileged Access Management Reviews

We have used ARCON Privileged Access Management for recording videos of user actions taken after logging into systems. Around thirty people, including network engineers, server engineers, and application engineers, use it in the company.

There hasn't been a notable financial benefit for our company from using ARCON Privileged Access Management. However, it provides good support for our compliance and security needs.

I use the solution in my company since the product is very good.

In one of the use cases attached to the solution, I remember that an ID got locked after being unable to unlock the ID three or four times as per company policy. As per the organization's policy, if you try to run a password three or four times, it will get locked. No options are available in ARCON Privileged Access Management to unlock a locked ID.

We use it for privileged access management.

Our purpose initially was to have a few critical projects. Not to have password management of all projects. So we started on a smaller scope. Later on, we implemented it across the organization. So now, all technical solutions are being controlled by ARCON. And the main area of improvement here is, we have ease of access. People have password-less access and a need-to-know-basis access whenever they require, when the approvals are in place for access. Previously, all this things were handled manually in the environment. Those we have automated, we have eliminated dependency on any manual intervention.

Everything is in the system. When a person wants to have access, they put in the data, the requirement, the timing, the other technical parameters. The project managers in charge of the infrastructure, they approve it and the access is available to the person who requires it, all the time. 

Equally we are able to monitor it all. It gives us the capability of monitoring it online, rather than going to the persons' desk for the activities being done. We sit in our office and monitor what is happening in the target device, using ARCON. The recordings and other things are available, in case any forensics are required.

During my training days, I used ARCON PAM as part of mandatory training. I even installed a version on my personal portal back then. Currently, I support a banking client who has implemented ARCON in their organization. 

ARCON PAM has several strengths. Firstly, they are very agile and constantly evolving their solution to meet the changing needs of their clients. They don't just stick to a base version; instead, they actively enhance and improve it based on client feedback and industry trends. Secondly, their management interface is robust, although it can be complex. They provide comprehensive data and analytics to help organizations manage privileged access effectively. Additionally, they regularly introduce new features such as RPA to stay relevant and innovative in the market.

ARCON can be used to protect privileged entities by granting access via remote RDP, SSH, or recorded systems. Any activity on the server, endpoint, or network device is recorded for compliance. 

Traffic is routed through a gateway, which enhances security by not requiring many open ports. This provides secure connectivity between the end user and the servers. ARCON also has password vaulting features, so passwords are not shared with users. 

Additionally, ARCON allows for just-in-time access to privileged terminals when needed and has implemented approval levels for access to critical servers.

The session management capabilities are helpful. The session recording feature for system handling is good. It also eliminates the need to open many ports for end-users, simplifying access. 

Only one port needs to be opened from the user's machine to the PAM server, and the PAM gateway will connect to the end server. This can be customized to use custom ports, further enhancing security.

Primary use is to control Microsoft administrators.

It has improved our government compliance score in terms of audits. Auditors used to ask this basic question: Who has done what? We never had an answer because everyone was logging in using a common ID.

The second improvement is the discipline that has developed in the administrators. They definitely want to do things in the right manner and nobody wants to do anything wrong because the recording is going on and everybody knows that they are being watched.

Many hackers or cyber attackers think about getting access to confidential user data of a company or other security information. ARCON Privileged Access Management protects such sensitive information and documents. 

The solution monitors that no privileged users indulge in malicious code or click on malicious links. An employee who wants to share sensitive information outside the organization won't be able to share such data because of this solution. Notifications are sent by this solution to the network admin whenever a malicious activity is practiced. 

The notification alert feature where the network admin gets notified of probable malicious activity is the most valuable feature. 

Our company is involved in the health care sector and our primary use case of this solution is for compliance. Previously we used a system that included an Excel sheet but it would crash all the time because we have a large number of IT executives; tech related, application development and other administrators. We weren't able to receive the complete audit file that told us who was accessing and who was deleting what. It wasn't in compliance with data information security. For that reason we introduced the PAM solution and it's working extremely well. We're using it constantly on a daily basis. We are customers of ARCON and I'm a project manager. 

There are several valuable features in the solution. First, it's 100% compliant and you don't have to maintain ID management for each and every user. That's from the management perspective. From the technical aspect I would say that it completely meets our requirements.