CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews

The primary use case for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager in our organization is to ensure we move away from named identity admin access, which lacks protection such as MFA and other features offered by cloud privileged identity management solutions. Our goal was to protect anything on-prem related to Active Directory privileged access, so we chose to go with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager.

I am the cybersecurity lead in my organization. Every single year when we do the audit, one of the things that consistently comes up is how there are hashes floating around the environment. Since switching over from named admin-privileged identities to CyberArk PAM identities, like PAM accounts, there have been almost no breadcrumbs left behind. There are no hashes and that sort of thing. We hardly see any hashes floating around the environment. We have not done the audit yet, which is due next month, but I have been keeping an eye on the hashes and it is looking promising.

The session recording and monitoring capabilities are valuable. We have real-time session management ability to record, audit, and monitor any privileged user activities. That is a big deal.

Automatic credential rotation and granular access control for target resources accessed by admins add to the value. 

Seamless integration with the SIEM, especially Microsoft Sentinel, is valuable.

Lastly, the platform's versatility allows for the use of different types of platforms beyond just RDP and SSH, including SQL and web applications.

There is room for improvement, particularly with Vendor PAM. We were previously using a competitor product that allowed vendors to manage their own teams. CyberArk has brought a feature called Vendor Team Manager, but it does not provide full access. It requires the vendor team leader to be onboarded as a local account instead of using their email address. Improvements could be made to onboard the vendor team leaders using their email, allowing them to manage their own team. That would greatly reduce the overhead in managing vendor team members. We have 50 to 100 vendors. Each vendor has at least 10 to 20 accounts., so we are talking about 500 to 1,000 accounts. It would be easier if we could just manage those 50 vendor team leaders rather than hundreds.

We have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for six months, having started on the first of July.

Stability has been impressive. We have not experienced downtime for any reason. We did encounter one bug, but it was resolved once a patch was applied. The system is very stable and seamless. It requires minimal intervention to maintain high functionality.

When we took over as system owners of CyberArk, I thought every single time there was an update, we would have to stay up the night to do the patches and make sure it worked, but it has been very smooth and seamless. There is no friction. Everything has been taken care of at the back end, and we have not had to do anything out of hours. It has been very good.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

So far, scalability has been excellent. Initially, we deployed the architecture for 10 to 20 users, but we have onboarded 30 users while still on that mid-tier configuration. We have had no issues.

Being a mining company, we do have operations at various sites. That includes multiple sites in Australia as well as a couple of sites in Northern America. We do have multiple sites with critical infrastructure on every single site. 

At the moment, we have 50 user licenses, and so far, we have onboarded 30 users. We have 20 more users and some more coming on board in the new year.

I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

CyberArk's support is excellent, providing personalized assistance through a dedicated local account manager and sales engineer. Their responsiveness is impressive, even though our location is quite isolated. We receive prompt support, which often exceeds expectations.

The dedicated local account manager has been providing us with personalized assistance tailored to the unique challenges that we have as a mining organization. The sales engineer supported us with his expert technical guidance during the deployment as well. It has been amazing. Both of these guys ensured smooth implementation.

For any issues that are not important, we raise tickets for customer support, and they have been very responsive. They get us back promptly. That is something unheard of because we are a very isolated city in Australia. Ours is the most isolated city in the world. The nearest city to us is 2,400 kilometers away. For someone like us, the support has been amazing. Sometimes, with other vendors, we have to wait a couple of days to hear back from them, but CyberArk has been exceptional in coming back to us with immediate responses. Their support has been perfect. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

Previously, we used BeyondTrust. We decided to switch to CyberArk due to its superior support, scalability, adaptability, and the local presence of account managers and sales engineers, which facilitated a smooth and effective experience. 

While other products in the market may offer certain features at a competitive price, they often compromise on support, scalability, and adaptability. The main thing for us was the support. CyberArk combines top-notch technical capabilities with the local human touch of the local account managers and sales engineers. That was a big thing for us because that ensured a smooth and effective experience throughout the journey, which other products lacked. 

We are in the West of Australia, and all the competitors are in the East. The only way to communicate is over the phone, and we would only see them once or twice a year. Having local account managers and a sales community was a game changer. Also, considering the reputation and the gold standard for Privileged Access Manager, others cannot compete with CyberArk.

It is a fully SaaS model, but because of the way CyberArk is architected, we do have our jump servers, PSM connector servers, and Secure Infrastructure Access servers in Azure, but it is not self-hosted. It is a cloud solution.

The jump start that was offered as a part of the product licensing was a game changer. When it comes to CyberArk, the complexity is quite high. That comes with security. Security and usability do not go hand in hand, but we have had help throughout our journey. The initial setup was detailed and supported actively by CyberArk's jump-start engineer. Every question was addressed, and the deployment was well-structured.

To realize its benefits, we had to wait until the users were happy using the PAM accounts. The individual privileged identities were still being used, so it took almost three months. That was the time it took for us to onboard the PAM accounts, hand over those accounts to the users, and confirm that it was working as expected.

In terms of maintenance, I thought there was going to be a lot of maintenance because we are the system owners, but so far, it has not skipped a beat. All the updates were very smooth. We did not have to do any work installing the patches, apart from underlying Windows patches, which is the sysadmin's job. If sysadmins are able to patch them, the product is resilient enough to come back up and do its function. Any updates related to the product itself are installed in the background, and it is very transparent for the user. It has been very seamless.

CyberArk's jump-start engineer played a crucial role in our successful deployment. He helped us all the way. Even now, about six months into the journey, he is helping us out with a few bits and pieces. Having that jump-start there was a game changer.

During our quantitative analysis, we estimated potential savings of one to ten million dollars a year by using a PAM solution. A cyber breach relating to admin-privileged access could lead to a financial loss of ten million dollars. If a standard user account is breached or compromised using their credentials, they cannot escalate to our higher privilege ones or cannot move laterally within the network. That was a game-changer.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is perceived to be somewhat overpriced compared to similar market products. It is a little bit overvalued. It could come down a little bit for my liking. However, the industry-leading reputation and the quality of service justify the high price point to some extent.

I would highly recommend CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. It is a leader in the privileged access management space, offering robust tools to secure credentials across IT and OT environments. We are very heavy on OT environments. It has been nothing but the best.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a ten out of ten.

I am a senior manager, and we have multiple clients for whom we deploy CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. We also manage or upgrade their instances. We handle migrations and new implementations. We take care of anything related to CyberArk.

The feature that I like the most is the Privileged Session Manager. It offers session recordings, logging, and tracking of user workstreams. It keeps a record of activities, allowing me to easily fetch screen recordings to detect any misuse and see who did what and what happened. Its benefits can be seen immediately after the deployment.

Based on the user experience that I see on a day-to-day basis, some changes could be made to the Privileged Session Manager tool to make it more user-friendly. The user interface of that tool could be more advanced and understandable to laymen, rather than being more of a developer tool. I would recommend more user-friendliness there.

CyberArk is more focused on the cloud solution. They are not going towards on-prem, but a lot of clients still like the on-prem solution. With the cloud implementation, you have a lot of dependencies on expert services. When you get into some issues, you have to wait for expert services. They usually reply in two to three days. That is something CyberArk needs to make better. If they want clients to move to the cloud, they need to support them in real-time. The client should not be waiting for two days to get a response for the issue. If CyberArk wants people to pay for cloud services, they need to make the cloud services much more real-time.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for approximately six years.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is a stable solution. I have never faced any issues with stability.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is a scalable solution.

I have contacted their support a lot of times. The quality of support is okay, but the time frame for replies should be much faster than it is currently.

Neutral

I have not used any similar solution for PAM. However, for managing the accounts, we have used some password management solutions such as 1Password, but they do not give you the accessibility and different components that PAM provides. They are just for password storage and keeping the passwords safe. A PAM solution from CyberArk or BeyondTrust solution provides a lot more than that, so we cannot compare them. There is no comparison.

I have deployed it both on the cloud and on-prem. My one client is on-prem, and another one is on the cloud.

The initial deployment depends on how extensive it is. For one client, it was quite easy, but after the deployment, it was tricky to deploy the components for AEM, EP, and CCP. On-prem implementation is much easier than the cloud. Cloud solutions require better and more immediate support. Cloud deployment is challenging due to dependencies on expert services.

It requires a bit of maintenance but not that much. Once you deploy the solution, it works, but there are always new upgrades. For example, if you deploy a web connector for web applications and Chrome releases an upgrade, you have to see whether CyberArk is supporting that upgrade or not. Accordingly, you have to update the drivers and other things for the web applications. The same goes with PSMP and SMP. If there are any version upgrades or any vulnerability patch fixes, you have to perform maintenance.

We help customers deploy it.

The duration depends on how big the instance is. To deploy all the components, the duration can range from three to six months.

It can be deployed by one person, but it also depends on how many instances of servers you are deploying, what is the concurrent usage, how many users are being onboarded, and what components you have. There is PSM. There is EPM and PSMP. It depends on what exactly the client requires. These are some factors that determine the time frame and number of people required.

From a client perspective, CyberArk's pricing is fair but there is a significant increase each year. They should limit the price increase because this could potentially drive customers to other partners. Price changes should be at defined intervals. There should not be sudden jumps.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager an eight out of ten.

We use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to manage privileged access, so all the privileged accounts are vaulted in CyberArk, and that's our control method to manage privileged access. We also manage access for developers, so we have dual control to give approval to developers.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has made our operations more streamlined. There is an approval process, so it helps us keep tabs on who's working on what and for how long. We also have to give a reason when we're using privileged accounts, which helps keep track of whether they're being used correctly. 

It's been good so far in safeguarding the infrastructure, but we've not used additional features of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Modern PAM with secure web sessions or secure infrastructure access is something that I learned about at the conference. I am curious about how we can use it.

It has not helped to reduce the number of privileged accounts. Whatever we find privileged in the environment, we want to control that by using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. That's how we're able to control it. It has helped us identify privileged access better because we discovered users who didn't need privileged access. There have been cases where users with privileged access don't want their accounts in PAM because they need to pick up the password on a daily basis to perform their actions. There have been cases where they've gotten their privileged access off the account because it's not needed.

The user interface needs some training, but with a guide telling the user how to go about it, we have received positive feedback from whoever has used it.

It took us some time to realize its benefits because any new tool needs a proper understanding of how it can be used. A lot of testing was done on the engineering side, and demos were given. It took some time, but it is going smoothly.

Given that this is the only tool that I've worked with for the control process of privileged access, I don't have anything to compare it with. However, it's helped us keep our privileged access in check. We're able to get logs as to when the user checks out an ID and for how long, so it's a good monitoring tool.

They covered a lot at the conference. I don't have visibility into what product we've bought. It would be nice for them to approach us with what we have bought versus the new features being added. We need clarity on whether new features come included in the package that we already have, or if it's something that we need to have over and above.

Occasionally, there are lagging issues. Sometimes users have to re-login. When users copy passwords, there is sometimes a lag, so they have to log out and log in, but these are very rare cases.

I've been using it for about 5 years.

Occasionally lagging occurs. I've not heard about crashing, but there is a lag. Sometimes users will have to re-login and get it right.

The team that I work with is our in-house engineering team. I've had a conversation with CyberArk once last year revolving around efficiently generating the inventory reports. I contacted the technical support, but I didn't get a very straightforward solution that I was expecting.

We were developing a dashboard to find all the privileged accounts that weren't vaulted in CyberArk. We wanted the inventory report to be generated on a daily basis, but were having some trouble. We reached out to their technical support. The solution that they proposed was not straightforward because of the backend processes of CyberArk. We had to approach it in a different way.

Neutral

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a seven out of ten.

My use cases for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager are specifically for privileged access management. We are using it along with other products. They have access management, their own certificate manager, and other managers. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is for privileged access for users who require more than normal access, such as administrators and engineers. We can rely on this tool to manage that access.

You can see the benefits of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager immediately. This is risk management. You are not getting any features from the tool. It's not something that you are installing because you want it, for example, ChatGPT. With CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, you're getting control. You're not getting any additional features for your platform or systems. You are just controlling the risk. Users can't do what you aren’t allowing them. They can't make any change without approval, so it controls risks. Once you see that value, you're controlling what the privileged users in your system are doing.

The most valuable feature I find in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is that we can record the sessions. It provides flexible workflows. I can change the workflow to specify if it needs one approval or two approvals, and I can approve my peer. We can record sessions for external people who want or require privileged access to our systems. That is very flexible. We can record what people are doing in the platform.

I find it hard to mention a point of improvement because I'm happy with the platform. The only thing I would say is that they can improve their price. 

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for three years.

Regarding the stability of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, I have seen a couple of times that the server was not available. In three years, it has only been a couple of times. It has high availability and low impact. In terms of the platform, it is stable.

The scalability of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has been good; the only thing is the license. The platform is very scalable, but you need to get more licenses in terms of users.

I don't handle that kind of interaction, but my engineer does. Sometimes it requires escalation, but I have not heard of any complaints from him in terms of the support received. It is good.

Positive

I have used Delinea but not in this company. I prefer CyberArk over Delinea.

It is not that easy. You need to load the users and platforms that you will be using. You need to teach the users how to do it. It requires some change management. It is a bit complicated, but it is expected. It is not just plug-and-play.

Its maintenance depends. You can have an on-premise solution or you can have a cloud solution. We have an on-premise solution, so it requires some maintenance on the infrastructure.

Its implementation requires a team effort

With the current model of licensing, for my use cases, sometimes it's hard to convince the management and get budget approvals for it. It's expensive and you're not getting anything new. It's just a control, but in terms of risk, you are covering a big impact on the company. Improvement in the licensing prices is something I would want to have.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager as an eight out of ten.

The use case of privileged access management is self-explanatory. A large telecommunication company like ours needs to protect our privileged access because every attack cycle has privilege escalation, and we have to stop attackers at this point. 

We have a lot of vendors or third parties working with us. They need to access our resources. The trust level of external third parties is lower than direct employees, so we do not want to share our critical credentials with them. That is our primary use case. 

Another use case is managing internal employees, especially highly privileged administrators. Furthermore, the critical business applications and areas throughout our IT infrastructure involve privileged access, and we aim to protect those. We want the ability to audit and have real-time control.

I appreciate CyberArk's real-time capabilities. I can secure critical sessions, such as SSH or database sessions. As a security professional, I have real-time visibility into ongoing sessions. If anything suspicious occurs, I can terminate or freeze the session, which is part of user behavior analytics. 

We can monitor and have real-time control over our environment with sessions coming from around the world, ensuring security. We have visibility and control through real-time user behavior analytics. That is my favorite feature.

It has a learning curve and is a complex product that requires dedicated training and people. 

Maintaining the product is challenging. Upgrades require a lot of resources, as it impacts the entire organization. For example, upgrading components like the Privileged Session Manager (PSM) and the vault is time-consuming and difficult. In the long term, I would like to see these processes simplified, especially for on-premise installations.

I have been using this solution since 2018, which is a little over six years for me.

The product is solid and works as designed. The product itself is not yet very mature. That is one side. Another side is not putting enough resources into it as a customer. Most of the time, any stability issues are mostly with the customer, not the vendor. Proper fine-tuning and expertise ensure the product performs well.

It is highly scalable. We started small and expanded it to an enterprise level, and are now moving to the cloud for further growth. Its architecture offers scalability. It can grow much bigger than our company. It provides all the flexibility and modules if you have the required expertise.

CyberArk's customer service has improved recently and is now very responsive. However, four to five years ago, they were average. They are now at acceptable levels.

Neutral

We are fully on-prem for the PAM, but we are moving to the cloud.

Its deployment is not easy due to CyberArk's complexity. We started from a small footprint and then moved to a larger deployment. It was a lot of work. This could not be managed without CyberArk-certified engineers. It is very complex.

We can never deploy and manage it fully by ourselves. No company has that expertise, so you always need CyberArk-certified engineers from a third party when it comes to critical things. We have over 30 servers running for the CyberArk solution. All 30 servers have different pieces of this complete solution. We can never upgrade it by ourselves without professional services. We can do some of the things ourselves, such as day-to-day management, troubleshooting, and operations, but for upgrades, installations, migrations, and disaster recovery, we need professional services. We have a separate budget every year for professional services.

We have a team including myself from governance, a project manager, senior leadership, and hands-on team members, among others. It requires four to five people from security and two CyberArk-certified engineers. I need two engineers because if one gets sick in the middle, the other person can take over because there is no going back when we start the upgrades and critical changes. We have four to seven knowledgeable and dedicated people in a critical scenario.

Pricing is a problem. CyberArk is expensive compared to other products I know. It is similar to buying a German car. It comes with all the bells and whistles, but some companies may find it too expensive.

I compared CyberArk with a product called Delinea. I preferred CyberArk because Delinea required additional agents installed on each target for session recording, whereas CyberArk does not. There was a difference between the two products in how they did the session recording. Because Delinea needs an extra agent installed on each target to do the session recording, you have a huge amount of work managing those target agents on probably thousands of servers. You need another team to do that. An extra workforce is needed to manage that. That was the first turn-off for me. CyberArk does not need an agent. It is in real-time. It drops DLLs to the target host during the session so that you do not need to manage the agent.

The most important aspect for us was that Delinea did not have real-time controls. They said they were developing that piece. They could only analyze recordings after the event had already happened, but then you are too late. All the artificial intelligence and machine learning were applied for the post-event activities. That was a big differentiator. CyberArk's real-time controls set it apart as Delinea only analyzed recordings after events.

These were the two main reasons for going with CyberArk. Everything else was fine. For an average-sized company, Delinea is fine, but for a large-scale company, CyberArk is a better choice.

It took us some time to realize its benefits because there was a learning curve for us. It took us about a year to get our heads around this product and start effectively using it. It is a journey. It takes at least five years for any company to make this product very useful and reach maturity. It is not only the product's fault. The company needs to have a vision, and the company culture needs to go with it. Senior leadership needs to support the vision. You need to have lots of ingredients for success. If everything is in place, you will see success after one year. In the first year, it is a struggle for everybody.

My company was bought by a bigger company, and they were very new to privileged access management. Everybody was struggling. The advice I would give is to have a good vision for privileged access management. You need dedicated teams, senior management support, and proper company policies and standards before implementing the solution. Start building knowledge slowly and avoid jumping into the deep end without preparation.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.

We're using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to manage our service accounts, privileged service accounts, and password rotation. We also use Conjur.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has helped our organization remain compliant in the privileged access management space. It is very helpful for meeting compliance and regulatory requirements such as SOC, SWIFT, and PCI DSS.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has helped us become more efficient in managing these service accounts.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager feels quite secure in ensuring data privacy.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has a very strong potential for preventing attacks and lateral movements, but it has not had an impact one way or the other on the number of privileged accounts in our organization. They are just managed differently.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager makes it easy for users to retrieve and manage their passwords.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for a few months. I am still learning, and I appreciate all the networking and education at the CyberArk Impact in Boston, which is going to set me up for success as I take on my role.

In CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, the UI has room for improvement, as does the dashboard reporting, which could be made better or easier to use. The interface needs to be more intuitive in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. There should be dashboards in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager with more data and reporting capability for the non-compliant scenarios.

My company has been using it for a long time; I have been using it only for a few months.

I have not had any support experience with CyberArk at this point in my journey. 

I found the CyberArk Impact event to be much more effective as an educational experience.

Positive

The time-to-value for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager was recognized pretty quickly after implementing it.

I hope to learn how the pricing works so that I can understand it better, but I am certain it is not inexpensive.

It is absolutely necessary to have a PAM tool like CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, even if someone is using other security tools.

Based on my experience thus far, I would recommend CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to other users.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager as an eight out of ten. It is early in my journey with this solution.

I use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to manage privileged access within the organization.

By implementing CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, we wanted the management of periodic password rotation, management of privileged access, and discovery of privileged access.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager’s ability to safeguard credentials for our organization is very important because it helps in managing the keys to the kingdom, especially the privileged access for various platforms. It is quite important for the organization, and it is one of the must-have applications. It plays a key role in managing privileged access for the organization.

We are able to manage close to 20,000 accounts without many cases by using out-of-the-box features available in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager helps in meeting certain compliance and regulatory requirements and closing any gaps.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has not helped reduce MTTR. When we have an incident with CyberArk, it takes time for us to recover. There is always an increase in MTTR because of the complexity of the CyberArk infrastructure itself.

From an operational efficiency perspective, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has reduced a lot of manual work, such as changing passwords and managing privileged access accounts manually. By automatically rotating passwords within a set period of time, it streamlines many processes. It has improved operational efficiency for privileged access, but managing the infrastructure is one of the things that we are working on. It is a complex product. 

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has not helped reduce the number of privileged accounts in our organization. Privileged accounts are the key entities within CyberArk. There has not been any decrease in the number of privileged accounts, but there are areas that we, as an organization, have not touched, such as cloud infrastructure, etc. We are working closely with CyberArk engineers to have them onboarded and manage those privileged accounts through CyberArk. That is in our road map.

The most valuable feature is platform management. It is quite easy to manage privileged access for certain target platforms with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager as compared to other products I have worked with.

It is very out-of-the-box and straightforward to configure periodic password rotations and access management for the platforms my organization is working with. That makes things easier in terms of what needs to be done. We do not have to spend time troubleshooting and working with support to figure out why something is not working, which is what I have personally done with other competitors.

One area for improvement is the user interface. It needs significant enhancements. It is outdated and does not align with the stress and challenges happening across the IT products landscape regarding user experience. CyberArk definitely needs to improve user experience and reduce complexity.

It is quite complex. CyberArk needs to reduce complexity. The product is currently very complex and challenging to understand without training. The product should be user-friendly and easy to use. CyberArk should understand that a product should not require training after a customer subscribes. Hence, user experience should be given the utmost priority.

Maintaining the infrastructure is not easy. Patching CyberArk Privileged Access Manager when there is an update or patch release requires professional services due to the complexity of the product. It takes us three months to six months to do an upgrade. For managing or monitoring the infrastructure, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager does not have any inbuilt tools. We have to rely on other tools which CyberArk does not recommend. There is no other way to monitor those infrastructure components. It is quite taxing and resource-intensive. For an organization of our size, at least five people are required to work full-time with CyberArk and monitor and maintain the infrastructure.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for more than two years.

Regarding the stability, it is pretty stable. We do not need continuous management. The performance is also very good for the size of our organization and the user base we are working with. We have not had any performance issues so far.

It is not easily scalable due to the on-premises infrastructure we use. It is not elastic like cloud-based solutions.

We have approximately 6,500 users. We have sized the environment accordingly. As an organization, we have done our own risk assessment to understand how CyberArk will grow in the next three years. We sized the environment accordingly so that there are no performance issues if it grows vertically or horizontally.

We use their premium support, but we do not get the value for the price we pay for the support.

For some questions, CyberArk support recommends professional services, which takes us on a financial route. From a customer perspective, it is unclear why I need to reach out to professional services for certain issues. If I have straightforward questions, I get answers from technical support easily. However, there have been instances where we were redirected to services requiring additional payments to get certain questions answered or receive suggestions.

Positive

In my previous organizations, I have used multiple products. I have also worked in a company competing with CyberArk. I worked on the development of a competitive product for CyberArk. 

I also implemented a competitor product in another organization which is listed as a leader alongside CyberArk. It was much easier to work with in terms of user experience compared to CyberArk. It was pretty easy to use and could be self-learned.

Its implementation is complex. If a new customer is onboarding CyberArk as a product to manage privileged access, it is quite complex.

Its integration is pretty straightforward. There are many out-of-the-box connectors. There are also a lot of connectors available in the marketplace to have CyberArk integrated with various systems. For a particular connector, testing to production took close to six weeks.

As CyberArk always recommends, we went with one of their partners to implement it within the organization.

We have three key engineers within the team responsible for managing the entire CyberArk architecture. They handle monitoring and management. They also work with other business units to have the privileged access vaulted and determine the road map for privileged access management. They also help in performing certain day-to-day business activities or tasks.

It took us close to three years to see its value and understand why it was chosen over other solutions.

I have heard from my leaders that CyberArk is costlier in terms of licensing. The support and maintenance are also costly. We use their premium support, but for the price we pay, we do not get the value.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is pretty costly, and it takes a lot of time to implement it. It is quite complex to implement CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, but once it is properly implemented, with the user community that is available with CyberArk, it is pretty straightforward and easy to use. Once implemented, it does provide value for the organization.

I would advise sizing it appropriately and building the infrastructure accordingly so that it is scalable. When it is sized properly in terms of CPU, RAM, memory, and disk size, it works smoothly without requiring specific maintenance, such as clearing logs. That is what I would recommend to any of my peers or colleagues working in other companies.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a six out of ten. Four points are deducted because of its complexity.

I use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to manage the privileged credentials of our environment.

When I arrived at my company, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager was already deployed, so I didn't set it up myself. However, I've increasingly taken over its management during the past five and a half years. I saw its benefits almost immediately. Much of the value is tied to user adoption; as the end-user base becomes more familiar with CyberArk and embraces it, the benefits increase. Conversely, when we have users who know CyberArk exists but don't trust it, prefer their own methods, and avoid using it, its effectiveness is reduced. Ultimately, the more users embrace CyberArk, the greater the benefits I observe.

The best feature of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is its core function: automatically managing and securing credentials. The ability to ensure compliance with both our internal and industry standards is invaluable, particularly in the current environment. While managing a couple of thousand accounts may not be a large number within the CyberArk community, it significantly simplifies our work in ensuring compliance and maintaining standards. The PSM feature is also excellent, as I've found it increasingly helpful in establishing connections without exposing passwords. Although a bit clunky when I used it a few years ago, it runs much smoother now. Overall, it's a great product, and I appreciate most of its features.

We use the privileged cloud model. However, transitioning from a traditional on-premises deployment to the privileged cloud has resulted in losing access to many logs and administrative tools typically available on the back end. For instance, we can no longer examine safes directly, delve into the vault to set permissions more granularly, diagnose port issues, or manage license allocation. These functionalities were readily accessible with our on-premises setup, but the cloud environment significantly restricts them. One highly desirable feature, for which I've seen an enhancement request already submitted, would be the implementation of more comprehensive logging around platform and policy changes, including details on the nature of the change when it occurred, and who made it. I recently encountered an instance where one of our platforms was altered without knowing when or by whom. This lack of auditability makes it impossible to understand the rationale behind the change, even though it appears relatively intuitive. Therefore, enhanced logging would be a valuable addition to our current system.

I have been using Privileged Access Manager for five and a half years.

Generally, the performance of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is quite good, and we've experienced very few issues. Specifically regarding the PSM, the response time is typically excellent. However, some users have reported occasional timeout issues where the PSM session terminates unexpectedly. The source of this problem is unclear, as it could originate from the target server or the PSM server itself. While I encountered more issues with the PSM a couple of years ago, the response time has significantly improved recently. There are inherent challenges due to the multiple network connections involved, mainly when mapping network drives to transfer files within a PSM session. This connection can be slow, especially when enumerating folders during file system traversal, but it's likely an unavoidable consequence of the process.

Scalability is straightforward. While the initial deployment presents some challenges, deploying additional servers afterward is quite simple. The servers are robust in terms of their handling capacity. In discussions with CyberArk engineers, I learned that the expected load for the CPM and PSM was discussed. The CPM, in particular, can reportedly handle up to 50,000 accounts independently without issue. Given that we only have a couple of thousand accounts rotating, deploying an additional CPM would be a relatively easy task, achievable in less than a day. Therefore, scaling up appears to be quite feasible if necessary.

We subscribe to premium support, and it's been excellent, providing us with relatively rapid responses and overall good experiences. Previously, with regular support, the quality was inconsistent and heavily dependent on the technician assigned to our ticket. Some technicians were excellent, diving right in, carefully reading my notes, and offering helpful solutions. Others seemed to overlook the details I provided. For instance, I'd explain that I'd already consulted a specific knowledge base article and implemented the recommended solution without success, only to have the technician suggest I review that very same KB article, which I had just referenced.

Positive

I rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager eight out of ten.

The connector servers require minimal maintenance. The only constraint is keeping the browser drivers up-to-date for web application connections, which can be more of an annoyance than a hindrance. Overall, there is not much maintenance involved for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager.

My advice for new users is to read the documentation. There's a lot of good information in there. I know it can be a bit of a drag to go through it all, but as you work, especially on the administrative side, you'll find that it contains a lot of information that can save you headaches. It would help you avoid opening tickets just by reading and following the guidelines. The documentation is pretty good, though not perfect; there are actually several errors. However, for most day-to-day activities, it's quite helpful.