ARCON Privileged Access Management Reviews

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.

One common problem I faced with ARCON PAM was compatibility issues with certain software versions. For example, if a user was using a non-supported SQL version, they would encounter errors. Resolving these issues often involved troubleshooting for days, and if no solution was found, we had to raise a ticket with the OEM for a patch. Additionally, there were occasional issues with password resets.

The most effective features of ARCON PAM for securing privileged access are password rotation and password vaulting. Password vaulting ensures secure storage and monitoring of privileged passwords. Additionally, the solution offers an arch and light environment tailored specifically to client requirements, which enhances security without unnecessary complexity.

The session management and monitoring capabilities of ARCON PAM greatly impact security posture. For instance, in banking environments in India, session monitoring helps provide detailed logs and even video recordings of user sessions. This ensures transparency and accountability and allows organizations to detect any unexpected activities or unauthorized access.

The user interface of ARCON PAM is generally user-friendly, but it requires some training for users to get accustomed to it. Basic instructions are provided for logging in and using features like multi-factor authentication. However, additional guidance may be needed for users who are not familiar with the system, as they might encounter simple issues that require clarification.

I would recommend ARCON PAM primarily for small to medium-sized organizations across various industries such as banking, insurance, finance, and healthcare. While it can also scale for larger organizations, it is particularly well-suited for medium-sized companies. Compared to other solutions like CyberArk, ARCON PAM offers similar capabilities at a more affordable price point which makes it a cost-effective choice for organizations with limited budgets or specific deployment requirements.

Overall, I would rate ARCON PAM as an eight out of ten. To make it a ten out of ten, they should focus on enhancing the user interface to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. Additionally, reducing dependency on specific browsers and versions would improve flexibility and ease of deployment for clients.

Privileged access management (PAM) is why we use ARCON Privileged Access Management.

Feature-wise, remote access, and server access are some of the things I found to be valuable in the solution. Also, our customers are satisfied with the solution.

Sometimes, ARCON Privileged Access Management's website would crash. So, because of this, video logs and other such related things are not captured. Sometimes, we face certain performance issues while using the solution.

Apart from the aforementioned details, to make it better in terms of features, we need a backup strategy.

In the product, different things are available. Now there are other products, and there are similarities between those other products. So, they will have that script done. What we usually do is if you run the script, it will take one backup and keep it somewhere. So, we need that backup strategy since it is important.

I have been using ARCON Privileged Access Management for two and a half years. My company has a partnership with ARCON. We suggest the solution to our customers. I have implemented the solution for more than four of our customers.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I'm handling the solution for all types of companies. So, it is not like I am only involved in small or medium businesses. From scratch itself, I am involved with all types of businesses.

Technical support is good. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The deployment process is a bit complex because no document is available. So we depend on YEM to confirm technical things. Also, if you need any new updates installed, we depend on YEM. The implementation takes an average of two days. Also, the time is based on the customer's requirements. For small customers, it may take two days. It will take a month for large customers with over ten thousand users.

Firstly, we understand the customer's requirements, like what they are looking for, and we gather that information. After that, we'll go for that implementation. First, we need to, like, go through the pre-sales stage, in which we try to understand their requirements and how they want to use the solution. Basically, we need to meet that scope of work initially.

Right now, in South India, I'm the only person taking care of the implementation.

Pricing is something you need to check with our salesperson.

It is a good product. So most of these new features in the solution are based on the customers' needs, and they develop it in a month. So, it is usually there in the next release.

In short, they first understand the customers' requirements. If ARCON meets the requirements to develop the new feature, it will develop them.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use it for managing our team's devices, such as remote desktops and Linux switches.

One of the main benefits we've experienced is that Arcon helps us manage all our team's tasks and provides recording capabilities. In addition, we also receive alert messages for the various features we use, which is quite helpful.

Some of the most valuable features include security measures such as password vaulting, as well as other features that help prevent big losses. The powerful vaulting feature is also quite useful.

Bulk password automation is not available in ARCON when compared to other products, and the cloud service is not intuitive for this behavior. For me, these could be some areas of improvement. 

We have been using ARCON Privileged Access Management for around two years. I am currently working with version 8.6. 

It is stable.

It is scalable. There are around 500 users who work with Arcon in my organization.

As of now, we have only escalated issues regarding password vaulting and sometimes there are problems with bulk password requests.

The customer service and support team is good. 

It was not easy or difficult; it was in the middle. It is deployed in a hybrid environment. The setup process may be on the same level as CyberArk.

We deployed it manually, not using automation. It is not difficult to maintain ARCON. It is easy to manage the solution. 

My recommendation is to onboard all the devices that we currently manage in our organization so that they can be accessed via PAM. I definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate ARCON Privileged Access Management a seven out of ten. 

We use ARCON Privileged Access Management to monitor and record our admin users' activity.

ARCON Privileged Access Management lacks a notification feature. The solution is very complex to use, and its product flow is not that good. ARCON Privileged Access Management is not a user-friendly solution, and the application flow from one screen to another is very complex. You need high expertise and skills to use the solution.

I have been using ARCON Privileged Access Management for one year.

ARCON Privileged Access Management is a scalable solution that takes a long time to scale. Around 20 administrators are using ARCON Privileged Access Management in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup was very complex.

The solution’s pricing is neither cheap nor expensive.

I am using the latest version of ARCON Privileged Access Management.

Since ARCON Privileged Access Management is very complex and not that user-friendly, I'll tell people to check it carefully before purchasing it.

Overall, I rate ARCON Privileged Access Management a five out of ten.

Our primary use case is for using servers or accessing servers remotely, mostly for common users.

The most valuable feature is it is easy to use and the interface is intuitive.

Sometimes it gets stuck between servers and I would like to see this improved in the future.

I have been using ARCON Privileged Access Management for the past six months.

There is stability.

The scalability is good and we have around ten thousand users currently.

I did use technical support but I was disappointed.

I would recommend and rate ARCON Privileged Access Management a seven on a scale of one to ten.

We are using ARCON Privileged Access Management for entire data centers.

The most valuable feature of ARCON Privileged Access Management is the recording of sessions. It has all the basic features we need to fulfill our use case.

We receive automatic updates as part of our subscription.

There are some features lacking but they typically are added when the upgrades are released.

I have been using ARCON Privileged Access Management for many years.

We have approximately 100 people in my organization using this solution.

We have over 200 servers and storage systems using this solution. The solution is scalable.

We use third-party support.

The initial setup of ARCON Privileged Access Management is easy.

We have a subscription to use this solution.

We did an internal evaluation of many solutions, such as CyberArk and PAM, we selected ARCON Privileged Access Management as the best for our use case.

I rate ARCON Privileged Access Management an eight out of ten.

We mainly use ARCON Privileged Access Management for managing the storage account password. Additionally, we maintain user activity logs from the server end to end.

By manually keeping the user logs, we can understand and manage all the operationalized tasks.

In terms of improvements, I suggest implementing password rotation for service-based accounts, as that should be included.

I have four years of experience using ARCON Privileged Access Management.

The solution has high stability. I would rate it nine out of ten.

When I have a script-related issue, I get delayed responses from technical support.

Positive

I previously used CyberArk. Due to issues with the industry, I switched to ARCON.

The initial setup was easy, as the project development is straightforward in ARCON.

The deployment was done by an integrator.

I don't have specific information on the ROI or pricing details. I have no involvement in pricing.

I did not evaluate other solutions.

I would recommend ARCON Privileged Access Management to others.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use it to access all the servers.

From the administrative point of view, there are cases that I have automated. I used to have to log in to all the servers. Now, it's really simple to work.

For compliance, each change I do, in each of the servers, is clearly recorded. We recently faced an audit and this was an awesome feature. Even our auditor had praise for it saying, "This is really a good feature."

In terms of automation, there are a number of cases, ARCON-related, where we are automating. It could be user-creation or services-creation inside ARCON. There are wonderful features which have really helped me a lot to automate things.

Also, a helpful feature from the compliance perspective is the reporting. Suppose there is one server and I want to know what are all the types of access to it. Suppose there are some 10 users who are using that server. I can easily fetch a report showing, for example, that there are two users who have server admin access; there are three users who have read-only access; there are five users who have prompt-access.

The connectivity of the user interface is really awesome. It is segregated properly. I don't know exactly how ARCON looks out of the box but ours has a little bit of customization. The user interface, overall, is really good. If I have some 20 servers in my ID, I can easily see for which servers I have read-only access, for which servers I have prompt-access, and for which servers I have server admin access. 

There are no APIs readily available. There are hundreds of products available on the market. It could be many applications, not just the server gateway. For many applications, by default, we will get the API. Let's say I'm trying to integrate "XYZ" application with another application. When we do that, usually, we look for APIs. But ARCON does not have the APIs readily available. Having that, for a complete end-to-end solution, would really help. 

As I mentioned, I'm working on automation for ARCON so that whatever the ARCON administrator is doing will be automated, rather than having to do it manually. For that, I had to spend months to get the API developed myself. Having that handy out of the box, that would really help, because what I am doing is not limited or restricted to the three or four cases. I'm going to automate the complete end-to-end solution of ARCON administration in our organization. So having an API would really help me.

Performance-wise, we recently upgraded. Since that upgrade, the performance has been really good. Now, I truly don't see any issues. So far so good.

There were some small glitches earlier but they have been sorted out now. There was a little bit of slowness where, when I was trying to log in to a server it used to keep saying, "loading, loading," but that has been resolved. There was another issue where I would log in to a server, but the moment I logged in, I would get disconnected. That has also been resolved. There was one more issue where, when I tried to log in to a server and key in the credentials, the credentials were not entered into ARCON. And then, due to the multiple attempts, the ID would become blocked. But that has also been sorted.

The product team, the support team is readily available, 24/7. We have direct contact. If there are any issues, I get direct support. I don't see any issue there. Overall, the tech support is very good. They are very supportive, and we are getting immediate support.

I don't recall the name of the product, but we switched because of a lot of performance issues. With that product, we used to get a lot of customer complaints as well as user complaints saying that they would be in the middle of some production activity and the performance would be very slow, causing the production activity to be delayed.

I cannot comment on the initial setup because it was done by our system admin team along with support from the ARCON team. 

We recently upgraded. There were no issues during that implementation. Our own support team was readily available, on-site, to implement it.

Although I'm not involved with this side of it, I assume pricing would have been reasonable, that is why we went for it. I would say definitely say it gives value for the money.

It has really helped us a lot. It's a wonderful platform.