ARCON Privileged Access Management Reviews

The primary use case is we want to control the access of the administrator. 

We have a lot of the administrators in our organization who have privileged access on the infrastructure, devices, servers, and network devices. We want to control this access, and at the same time, monitor this access. We use it to control privileged access of administrators on infrastructure and security devices, then monitor them from time to time.

It gives us a lot of control functions, which we were lacking in our organization. The privileged users, who are mostly administrators, are configured on the endpoints. We were not previously able to monitor, review, or control this. Therefore, it gives us a lot of comfort in terms of security level. Now, our infrastructure devices and servers are secured and nobody can have unauthorized access to them. Only the authorized users, whom we provide and approve access during any point of time, can access critical devices and mission critical systems. This is the benefit that we receive from this tool.

The best part of this product is the administrator convenience. The portal is very user-friendly. An administrator can use it very easily. This is the most important part of any privileged or anti-management solution. If it is not user-friendly an administrator will not want to use it. It has to be very user friendly and easy to use. 

What is a good feature here, just insert whatever target that you want access, then click next, and you will be in the system. I would suggest this should be the most prominent feature for any of the privileged or anti-management system.

What I like on this product: It is very easy, user-friendly, and an administrator can access it at any point in time without any hassle.

This product is lacking in terms of dashboarding analytics and should have user behavior analytics. It should also have better dashboarding for executive management and security managers, which this product is missing. 

Another important feature where this product is lacking, in terms of the managing the accounts, is in the active directory (provisioning and non-provisioning), or bridging it with the active directory. Thus, it needs anti-bridging.

ARCON needs three important things:

• The user behavior analytics should be there. 
• The dashboarding should be improved.
• Anti-bridging should be built into product.

This would make the product a comprehensive privileged R&D product.

In the future, I would like to have a type of functionality for the product with the mobile application. This would be helpful for some of our approvers, so they can approve at any point of time, sitting anywhere in the world when requests come in through the mobile application. Using the app, they can upload requests of the administrator or users. We would like to see this type functionality go on the product roadmap.

This product's performance is good, especially in terms of user access and approval metrics.

We have never faced any issues with scalability. This product is scalable enough. There are:

• Any number of services that you can add.
• Any number of users who can use it.
• Any number of infrastructure devices which can be added.
  

There are no issues in terms of support for this product.

Whenever we have had an issue, we raise a tech support ticket and immediately their tech support engineers come on a call. They do their best to try to resolve the issue. If they fail, sometimes to resolve the issue, then they work with their product team and come up with a solution immediately. The technical staff are good, and they are not facing hard issues in terms of support, because their technical skills are quite good.

We were not using another solution prior to ARCON.

It is not complicated; a very straightforward setup. Whenever they have to upgrade it, it is a 10 minute job. They upgrade the entire thing at one time. We have a two-tier architecture with a Gateway and a back-end application. Everything is deployed on the application, and the Gateway is only to connect to the end system. 

It is not multiple servers. It is not jump server technology. It is a very easy setup. You can have two servers and run it at any point of time.

The implementation is very simple. Whenever we have faced any issues, the vendor team can easily come and troubleshoot it, because of the simple setup which they have.

It is good value for our business. According to me, their competitors are more costly. Therefore, it is quite affordable. I find the ARCON to be much cheaper than the other products in the market.

Their licensing model is very simple, as it is based on the number of endpoints which you want to manage along with the number of users and administrators which you want to use. In terms of licensing, they are very flexible, because it is not a hard license. The licensing is simple, and there are only two types licensing: device licensing and user-based licensing.

We evaluated many other solutions along with the ARCON. We identified this solution as the best in terms of its accessibility. That is a main point. If an administrator can accept this, and it is very easy to use, it will be a successful product. 

We evaluated other products in the market, besides CyberArk. Ultimately, we decided to stick with this product. The cost is also a technical factor apart from the user convenience, which was the prime factor along with user acceptability. These were the two factors that we considered. Then we went ahead with ARCON.

While I have seen other products, and they are very good with dashboarding, reporting, etc. However, the analytics are so complex that the user is not able to use the product. There is a restriction in connection and containerization. You cannot take sessions, because others have taken sessions. Those are the constraints and challenges with other tools. 

Those challenges were there with the other tools, which I do not find in this tool. This tool is very simple and straightforward. If you have access, you can access the end system. From the moment our administrator accepted this tool, we did the PoC for this tool and they liked it.

The product is really a good product and a good value for the money, in terms of costs, user convenience, and functionality that they offer. It is a comprehensive, apart from a few things. The dashboarding and analytics are not very good, so they have to work on these two parts. Apart from those, they should have an anti-bridging functionality too. They are lacking only with these few things. I am sure they will be working on these points very soon, and they will be add to the roadmap to bridge the gap.

If any customer is looking for this product, and comparing it with another product in the market, I would suggest that they do a proper PoC. Do not go with marketing and branding terms. They should do proper business cases and give it to their administrators, then ask them to use it for at least a week or 10 days time. Afterwards, they should decide whether they want to ahead with this product or another product in the market.

The primary use of the solution is to give privileged access to critical resources, including monitoring and auditability.

Whatever my scope was, it was covered by the application.

I recently was having an issue with the Office 365 web browser. Therefore, I reported this problem to the ARCON team, and they brought in developers. They made it compatible with the new browser station of Office 365. 

The locks, which can be features. You can group various departments to obtain the approval records for workflows. Therefore, it creates a type of automation, and I do not have to manually do everything or configure things.

Video and audio logs are there for any activities that the privileged admin carries out.

For the in-house built applications, they need to provide good, solid access through their portal.

It has been very stable. I have not had an issue with this product.

It is a scalable product.

A year ago, our infrastructure was on-premise. Then, we moved to the cloud infrastructure. Even during that time, it was very easy for us to move this application and database from on-premise to cloud, as well as configure new things, such as load balancing. The product is very compatible.

When we transitioned from our on-premise to the cloud environment, and even during the transition period, we did not face any challenges or any problems with this product. There was just minor tweaking that we had to do with the new features on the cloud, like failover, as well as autoscaling.

Tech support is quite good. They have been right there to help me out. 

Their support details are good. 

We did not use a previous access management tool. This product seems to appropriately meet our scope financially, as well as technically, which is why we went for it.

Implementation was very straightforward. 

Implementation may take about half a day, then you have to create your environment. However, this depends upon how many resources that you need to configure through it. If you want to give access and resources to people, then you should have a clear plan for your implementation. For example, which groups should you give access to. These things take about half a day to implement. Then, configuration is about a day. 

Product pricing is based on users and connections. We did not have to pay more for additional features.

They do have some licenses, which are required for things like Linux servers. However, in my environment, we do not have Linux servers. 

We also evaluated Densify.

I am satisfied with the application. The scope and specs that we had are met by this product. It is a very good product which is scalable. 

Controlling the privileged access to all the target servers.

Provisioning of all administrative access through this solution. The privileged administrators are logging in to the solution using their domain ID and then getting access to the required servers based on their credentials. The administrators do not need to know the actual administrator's password. Otherwise, in an environment if you have N of servers, the administrator needs to know the ID password of each and every server. After implementation of this solution they are all stored in the password vault of this solution.

So in this case, let's say one administrator is managing a hundred servers. He may not know the different passwords of the different servers. That person will log in to this solution using his domain ID and password and he will get access to the servers he is managing. This is a primary use of this particular solution.

And then, after storing this administrator password in this password vault of the solution, the solution can automatically go and change the password based on the defined frequency with the defined complexity.

Additionally, it is recording video records for Windows and command-line reports for others, Linux and AIX, of whatever activities being carries by that particular administrator.

One thing which needs improvement is where it is keeping video logs of Windows Servers, whatever activities are being carried out by the administrator. Because Windows logs are a video, they are unsearchable, so if you need to search for a specific administrator and what he has done on a server, right now you need to go through different video logs of that particular timeframe. I think they are coming up with an additional feature where in it can be indexed and can be searchable.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We have designed a solution such that it has been implemented in both the production as well as the DR environments. Whenever we wanted to upgrade the product to the next version, we upgrade the DR first, then production. And whenever production is being upgraded, the entire access is switched over to DR for all the users. So effectively there is no down time for the end users, the administrators.

The stability of the product becomes very important. Otherwise, if the server in the solution is down, all the administrators lose their access for administration. It has proved its stability over the last five to six years.

We never had scalability issues. The primary issue will be storing the logs. The storage is attached to the SAN, so whenever there is a space crunch, in terms of storing the logs, we just increase the SAN storage. That's it. In terms of computer requirements, we never had an issue in terms of performance.

We had a little different model altogether. We had their resource on site for our support. We used to talk to the onsite person only. So I wouldn't be a right person to give you feed back on the tech support, as such. But whenever we had to escalate to tech support, there was a good response.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup is pretty straightforward, it is normal. There is application server, there's a gateway server and there's a database server. I don't think there is any complexity in that. 

The product's pricing is good value.

In terms of licensing, go for user-based licensing, without any limit on the target servers.

We evaluated different solutions. We evaluated CyberArk and, if I remember correctly, we had evaluated one more Indian product. I don't recollect its name.

Primarily we took the decision to go ahead with ARCON because the criteria for privileged administrative environment as a domain was evolving a lot at that time. It was in 2012. We felt that they offered many customizations, anything which was required that was specific to the customer's environment. They offered that customization to us. And they have come up with a number of customizations, and a number of good features over that period of time. With CyberArk, we didn't have that much flexibility in terms of customizing the product.

Obviously your administrators should participate in the decision to buy this product, because they will have to go through the solution to access any server or any device on which they wish to do administration. At times, initially, it may seem to people who are doing administration that their flexibility is removed. You have to make them aware that the solution brings them flexibility in terms of not remembering the passwords of many servers; when they have a number of servers to be administered, they write down the passwords. Those issues are taken away.

It also provides a lot of security to the administrator himself. He can also review what commands fired, what commands did not fire.

The solution was suited for the purpose when we evaluated it, and it has also evolved to meet the different needs, additional needs. I think it's continuing to evolve.

Used for server access management.

It has all the features that we require. In this regard I cannot tell you much other than that this solution is good for us, and we have been using it for a long time.

The most important feature is to know who is accessing the servers, the entire conversation that is happening between the servers and the client is recorded. It is a good feature if you want to do some analysis, and for investigation. So it is helpful to us.

I can't think of anything because the features which we require, it has everything that we need. So I cannot tell you much about the improvements required for this product. We are using all the features, and it is good to have.

The only thing is, while the product is good, they could do something on the support side. Support is quite good, but some improvements are required because the time to resolve is four hours. If they could reduce that to two hours, that would be good for us.

There has been no problem.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support is good, whenever we have issues they will resolve the issue, so the support is good.

The setup is not complicated because we implemented it in a single virtual platform, and using that console we integrated all the server platform for access, and directed user privileges. We provided users with a single sign-on.

The pricing works for us. Comparatively, this software's pricing is good.

We have suggested to other operations that they test this product. We have always spoken well about this product.

• Multi-user, multi-OS, multi-database, and multi-hardware platforms
• Cisco, Huawei, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.
• Lots of networking equipment including F5 Networks.

• It helps in managing privileged access management as well as password management.
• Auto-discovery
• Access control.

• Auto-discovery
• Access control
• Privilege management
• Security controls
• Identity discovery
• Usage of privileged accounts
• Time of sessions and monitoring of sessions.

• Security
• Access management
• Illegal activity finding.

Good.

Good.

Good.

No.

Good.

Yes.

It's not yet calculated.

No.

No.

No.

We prefer not to talk about our use cases for security reasons.

Overall, aside from the lack of password management, this solution is the best. It's a very good product.

The solution needs more work on the password management side of things. Password management is a big challenge for us, and I would like to improve this aspect. We're finding that BeyondTrust is better in this regard, which is why we're probably going to migrate over. It will offer better security I think.

I've been working with the solution for the past two and a half years.

The stability is really good on this solution. This product is really amazing. But in terms of our security, password management is a little bit of a worry for us. Security-wise, we need to change the password frequently. This product only has options for changing the password once a week, every two weeks, two days, or three days. Our recommendation is whenever users want to access the target server, they have to, every time, change the password. So this option is not available currently and it's a weak point.

The solution is scalable, but the security level doesn't increase. That might be an issue for larger companies and continues to be an issue for us. Still, we consider it to be a very good product.

We use this product quite extensively and on a daily basis.

We've made contact with the technical support team on multiple occasions. We even reached out about increasing the password security protocols as an added feature and they said they would consider it, however not much has changed there. They said they were going to release it as a new feature in the next release. That never happened. It's the reason we're looking at another product. It would have been great if they actually responded to their client's needs a bit more.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all.

We handle every aspect of the solution, from deployment and troubleshooting all the way through to managing and accounting. I personally have an administrator-level certification so I know personally how to handle the implementation of the solution and how to work everything in the background.

Deployment takes a maximum of two hours. It's not a long process.

We were able to implement the solution in-house using our own team. we didn't require the assistance of any integrators, resellers or consultants.

We're customers; we don't have any relationship with the business. We're not a reseller or anything like that. We just use the product.

Currently, we're using the solution. However, it's our intention to migrate to BeyondTrust in the near future.

Currently, we are using the latest version of the solution.

I'd like new users to know that the deployment really is quite straightforward, and it's easy to manage and troubleshoot. It's simple to restore the database within minutes if necessary as well. There are some great features that are available on the solution that makes it a worthwhile addition to a business. For us, security remains a concern, and password management is lacking. If an organization shares those concerns, this may not be the perfect solution for them.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

This product has helped us to protect privileged accounts and comply with password policies for privileged accounts. The video logs help us to identify any misuse of privileged accounts.

• Integrated dual factor authentication using mobile app
• Single sign-on
• Password vault
• Video recording

We expect improvement in the dashboards to provide visibility of password compliance status, whenever a password is opened from the vault. Also, flexibility to customize the live dashboard. 

We would also like to see support for privileged accounts used in web-based systems like Blue Coat Secure Web Gateway, VMware ESXI management tools, etc.

We faced one issue where video logs were not opening from all systems. The issue was solved after a version upgrade.

We found the product is scalable if we provide the recommended hardware by the vendor.

We have not had any issue with support. Support personnel are available whenever support is required.

We did not use any other solution.

Initial setup is straightforward and it can easily integrate with OS, database, network devices, etc., without the need for any connectors.

The product is available with competitive pricing. Licensing is not complex. We calculated the license requirements by counting the number of admins and the number of devices which were going to integrate with it.

We evaluated Iraje and CyberArk.

Every organization has a different environment, so do a thorough evaluation for different connection channels it supports like RDP, SSH, Telnet, web browsers, etc.

We use it for privileged access management for our production environment. We use it to record all of the changes that take place in our entire environment. That is the main function because there is a lot of compliance that we need to meet. It helps us meet those requirements.

Initially, we did not have any record of the production changes, what was been taking place in our infrastructure and environment. To work on this, we got in touch with ARCON. After the implementation, we were able to make changes and record all of the changes, either in the GUI mode or the command mode. This helps us to build on the changes that take place.

Because we are a financial institution, the compliance aspect is the most important for us. Using this ARCON product, we are able to leverage the compliance and auditing to meet the regulatory information and share it when we are required to.

The product is good but a lot of things can be changed, the way the system has been designed. All the access levels have currently been provisioned so a little more effort could be put into it to have a more friendly environment and user experience. The management portal could be a more friendly environment wherein I could deploy with fewer management resources from my side. We have been requesting from the ARCON team to have fewer management activities.

It's a really good, secure system. It meets all the requirements. We have a high-availability environment so even if the system goes down, we always have the backup available. Functionality-wise, the cluster setup means the product has HA capabilities.

We've had problems along the way but they were not major. The product support team has been very good. There was an issue with functionality within the product, which, as a technical team, we were not able to resolve. With the help of the product vendor, we were able to resolve it.

We did not have a previous solution. We were looking in the market for a product but we couldn't find one that met our requirements. ARCON provided a product that was able to meet the requirements and that's why we went with it.

Initially, because it was a new product for us, it was a bit difficult for everybody to understand the product. But since we've been using it for quite a long time, even the new features, the new screens, that have been deployed in the latest versions, are very user-friendly. It's not that difficult for the users to understand.

The product's pricing is a good value. We haven't had any issues with licensing.

We went through a few of the other products which were available but, as I mentioned, they did not meet all our requirements. In the end, we evaluated this particular product and chose to go live with it in our environment.

It's a go-ahead for any organization that is looking to meet their compliance and audit requirements. This is a very good product to go with for getting your work done.

It meets most of the requirements we have. I did not give it a nine out of 10 because there are still more requests that I am looking to have fulfilled, changes to be implemented in a new version. These would make the product more stable, as well as a better product on the market.