CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews

CyberArk's Privileged Access Management solution covers a whole range of features, like privileged web access, private vault, privileged session manager rights for a session in isolation, privileged threat analytics for analytics, and private sessions. We also use CyberArk's Application Access Manager, which includes their credential providers, such as agents and run servers. Then there is a central credential provider, which is API-based credential retrieval, and DAP or Conjur. This is more of a DevOps model for credential provisioning. We also have the Central Policy Manager, which rotates the credentials associated with unprivileged or servers accounts. It's a huge environment. 

Those are all the different functions we use. We initially purchased CyberArk for privileged access manager and session isolation of privileged users. By privileged users, I mean main admins, global admins, and preps like Azure or Office 365. Our initial use case was to manage those users who could drastically impact the environment if their credentials were compromised.

After we purchased the product, we had a third party on it. They suggested we also leverage CyberArk as part of the platform for managing service accounts, i.e. go out and proactively rotate credentials that are running or ordering services. That's another kind of big use case that we started implementing a couple of years. It's long work. It is tough to do, there's a lot of cases where it just doesn't work right, but overall it's been pretty valuable.

From a security perspective, CyberArk PAM gives us a lot of control and visibility into what our privileged users are doing. In terms of securing our cloud-native apps, we're just getting into deploying things to Azure, AWS, etc., and DAP brings a lot of value to that because it is cloud-agnostic credential retrieval. Azure has their key vaults, and AWS has their version if you are a multi-cloud solution. CyberArk's Secrets Manager, or DAP, brings a lot of value because you only have to learn how to integrate your apps with one solution that can be deployed across multiple clouds. 

I will say that CyberArk is struggling with some of the cloud integrations. For instance, Azure has a native identity solution, and Microsoft keeps causing issues with their ability to identify the hosts calling back. Some cloud providers are trying to lock CyberArk and other tools out of their environment and force you to use their native one. With that said, I don't use the other functions. I don't use the containerization Kubernetes integration or anything like that. We're not at that point yet. One of my significant concerns about investing a lot of time in CyberArk Conjur or DAP solution is that Microsoft seems to be trying to push them out of that space, and if they do that, then all of that work is null and void.

In our initial use case, we found CyberArk's privileged session management functionality to be incredibly flexible. It's challenging to write these plug-ins, but if you have somebody with a development background, you can write all sorts of custom connections to support different functional applications. We've written over a hundred custom connectors ourselves that allow us to do all types of privileged session management for various applications. On top of that, the rest of the API-based central credential providers allow us to get away from credentials that may be hard-coded in the script or some application. 

CyberArk's web console isn't in a great state. Over the last three years, if not more, it has been transitioning from what they call the "classic UI" to its modern interface. However, there are a lot of features that you can only use in the classic interface. Hence, each version seems to put more makeup on the modern interface, but all of the complex functionality you need is still in the classic UI. 

I'm not sure they've figured out how to transition, and they're kind of in a weird state. So, while CyberArk has made strides, the web interface is painful, particularly as an administrator, because you have to bounce between these different user interfaces. It is an incredibly complex solution that requires at least a dedicated employee or more to maintain it, support it, and understand it thoroughly. If you don't have that, it's just not the right solution for you because it is very complicated. 

Many of the infrastructure folks who use the product dislike it because it complicates their workflow. They get a little less control, and they have to go through a specific solution. It proactively logs in for them, which obfuscates some of the issues that they may be troubleshooting. And I think some of the consumers aren't big fans of the product. Also, I feel that in the last year or so, CyberArk has been pushing very hard for customers to go to their cloud solution. It doesn't have the same flexibility as the on-premise version, which is problematic because that's where I see a lot of value in the solution.

I've been using CyberArk PAM for about four years now.

CyberArk support isn't the worst, but it's certainly not the best. I'd give it a six out of 10. They were responsive. After you submit a ticket, you get the typical response. You gather all the logs and send them, and then they do some analysis. They typically send you back to get more specific logs, so it's a standard support experience. I would not say it's great, but it is not terrible either.

Overall, as a partner in our digital transformation, CyberArk has been great. The technology adds a lot of value, but they're also very much engaged and concerned. The customer success manager very much wants to make sure we're getting value out of the tool. I guess my only concern there is that they are pushing very heavily for customers to switch to their new cloud solutions that may or may not fit our needs or expectations. I am worried that they're going to push even harder. For example, CyberArk might start offering features only available in the cloud solution that would make our future somewhat tenuous depending on what's going on. So my only hangup is that they're pushing cloud solutions that I don't think are very mature yet.

Neutral

The environment's architecture is very complex, depending on your use cases, and I'm talking about CyberArk as a whole. Their past solution — their AM solution — and all of the other solutions bundled together are straightforward, and it all needs to work together. Depending on your use case and the connected components you need to have or build, you must learn a lot. So, it's not as simple a thing to deploy — at least on-premise. It isn't straightforward. Our environment comprises 20 to 30 servers that we had to spin up and connect. Disaster recovery has to be thoroughly vetted, discussed, and documented because as you onboard and manage those privileged accounts, you need a way to get to them if something goes wrong.

It took about a month to get the product running and several months to onboard users. And when we start talking about Application Access Manager, that's ongoing, and I think that'll probably be ongoing for a very long time. We were targeting our specific use cases, so we started with interactive users. The whole idea was to restrict, manage, and monitor those interactive users. Our rollout proceeded from the most privileged users to the less privileged users. Then we started targeting service accounts and that kind of stuff. So it was a phased approach from highest risk to lowest risk to lower risk.

CyberArk PAM requires a lot of maintenance. Right now, we have about one and a half people, but I would say we need to add several more people to do a better job and add a lot of functionality. It requires a lot of maintenance and monitoring. They've relied on many different Microsoft features to secure the privileged session manager. It requires a lot of tuning, monitoring, and managing those solutions. They use AppLocker to restrict and isolate these running sessions, and AppLocker breaks all the time, so you have to go in and troubleshoot why it's broken and tweak it. That could mean adding a new rule or updating an application. It is a lot of maintenance, depending on your use case. But then again, we have gone very hard into privileged session management and developed over a hundred custom connectors. Another customer might deploy RDP and call it a day, drastically reducing maintenance.

If you ask me the ROI, I'm not sure I could give you an exact number. Security tools are pretty tricky when it comes to that. But if you're adopting a risk-based approach, this substantially reduces risk. It brought a lot of visibility and allowed us to monitor all of our privileged users, so it is valuable from the perspective of KPI, modern solutions, and risk reduction. If we were to score this on an internal risk review, our previous risk would rank four out of five, and we've lowered this to a low severity risk.

CyberArk had just changed switched their licensing model to perpetual licenses when we purchased, including the whole PAM Suite. Before we bought it, they were licensing each function individually, which got complicated and very expensive. When we decided to buy it, it was much more straightforward and still quite expensive, but it brings a lot of value and risk reduction to the organization. 

In the last year or so, it's my understanding that they have switched from a perpetual licensing model to pushing companies to a subscription-based model. I have not dealt with this yet, so I'm not sure my feedback on licensing would be too valuable because they've moved away from the license type we purchased.

This was our first foray into the PAM space. We did a proof of concept evaluating three different solutions, so CyberArk was the clear winner. I don't want to speak ill of any other solutions, but I will say that CyberArk's architecture was much more secure. Other competing solutions may leverage an agent that is installed on your local machine and runs your privileged applications locally, leaving a lot to be desired from a security perspective. 

CyberArk uses remote desktop gateways similar to Microsoft's RDS functionality, and it abstracts that privileged application from your workstation. So even if you're compromised, a malicious actor on your laptop or workstation would not be able to get to that privileged application. This was very valuable to us. Other solutions did not have that functionality.

As it stands today, I would rate CyberArk PAM nine out of 10. However, I'm concerned about the future of the platform. While I've had nothing but great experiences so far, I have concerns about how they've been pushing that cloud solution in the last year and a half. I feel like they're going to pressure us to move to the cloud even though they're not mature enough in the cloud. 

Rather than create a cloud-native version, they've migrated their on-premise solution to the cloud, but they don't allow cloud customers to access the backend, which I recommend all the time as an on-premise user. Instead, you have to submit a support ticket and have their support do things on your behalf, which delays your ability to work with the tool. Furthermore, they may not be willing to make the modifications you want because it would affect their ability to impact the solution consistently. CyberArk designed the on-premise version to be incredibly flexible, and I have never found a use case where I can't do the work I want to do. Their cloud model discards a lot of that flexibility, which is where I see a lot of value, so I have concerns about the future of the tool.

Also, I'd like to point out that service account management is incredibly hard, particularly in a company that's been around for a while. Any company looking to adopt service account management needs to know that it's not as easy as vendors make it sound. Many things don't work right out of the box, so the most important lesson we've learned is to calibrate the expectations of senior management when it comes to service account management because it is a lot harder than anybody thinks. You're likely to break things in the process of trying to manage these accounts. 

Within our organization, our security requirements, which are set by our customers, require CIS compliance. Those requirements mandated securing privileged passwords with encryption, both in transit and at rest. CyberArk PAM was selected as our solution, and CyberArk's Professional Services team conducted the initial installation and implementation. 

Three years later, I was tasked with implementing the product more fully, integrating more of the out-of-the-box privileged password change management automation features of the product within our environment.  

The out-of-the-box functionality, Windows OS Privileged local account password change management, was the first automation feature implemented, and by itself, the automation reduced the man-hour requirement for quarterly local privileged password change management enough to provide a complete ROI on the initial licensing investment.

Continued implementation of more of the out-of-the-box PAM functionality continues to produce man-hour savings, which frees up our security operations group to have more time to monitor, investigate, and resolve potential security issues on the network.

Our implementation is air-gapped from the outside world, and as such, we utilize a completely on-prem solution. Our highest risk is from privileged insiders, and CyberArk's answer to this challenge was the implementation of a Privileged Session Manager (PSM). With PSM, we were able to secure, control, and more importantly, monitor privileged access to highly critical network servers by using PSM to manage accounts and create detailed session audits and video recordings of all IT administrator privileged sessions on our most critical servers. The established sessions on the target systems are fully isolated and the privileged account credentials are never exposed to the end-users or their client applications and devices.

CyberArk PAM is a very broad product as everyone's requirements for implementation are different. In our particular case, the initial implementation was planned and developed by people who didn't know our specific network requirements, so the initial implementation needed to be tweaked over time. While this is normal, at the time all these "major" changes required CyberArk professional services to come in-plant and "assist" with the changes.  

Over time, the CyberArk product team has made this process simpler and has enabled more local administrator configuration and update functionality, which doesn't require sub-contracts.

Our program has been using CyberArk since 2014, although it was not fully implementated until I took it over in 2017.  

The product is very stable, limited only by the Windows Operating System is it built upon.

This product seems to be scalable to any size. Providing vault cluster services, distributed vaults, and DR vault implementations, the product is truly ready for global implementation.

Tier One customer service is not as responsive or as knowledgeable as I would like, however, once your service request is sent to a Tier Two support engineer, the knowledge and experience level increases dramatically.

In addition, within the CyberArk support environment, Technical forums are available in which other customers are very willing to share their experience, and offer possible solutions to non-critical issues.

Positive

This was an initial implementation to meet the regulatory requirements of a federal customer.

In our specific case, the initial setup and configuration were very complex, which was a result of the initial design being developed by our internal engineers and CyberArk professional services, neither of which had the "tribal knowledge" of how the network functioned, or how the processes of network engineering and security had been implemented.

The initial implementation was a joint project with CyberArk Professional Services and our internal Systems Engineers. The Professional Services engineers were very knowledgeable regarding the implementation of their products.

Our program realized the total ROI after the implementation of policy-based automated password change management, which resulted in a significant reduction in man-hours required to conduct password change management (PCM) on a multitude of network elements. 

For licensing on a localized on-prem installation, the CorePAS licensing model enables the most critical component products within the PAM stack, enabling multiple layers of security which can take a while to implement.

At the time of the initial implementation (2013-2014), after looking at the field of available products, CyberArk PAM was significantly more mature than the other available products. For that reason, CyberArk PAM was selected.

The greatest issue that I experienced with the implementation of the CyberArk PAM solution was inter-departmental politics regarding change. To resolve this, I relied on the CyberArk Customer Success team to assist with developing a strategy to get all of the stakeholders to accept the changes. Every CyberArk administrator needs to spend time learning about their customer success team since their purpose is to assist with making sure you have the knowledge you need to make sure your implementation is successful.

An example of one of the ways CyberArk has benefited our company is one of the simplest. And this one is something that a lot of companies struggle with: domain administrators and server administrators. These are among the top accounts that most companies need to protect. As part of our deployment, we decided to go with these first when we deployed PSM.

What we found out was that there's always that friction with operational teams where they don't want to do this kind of work because it is another thing they have to do. But once the product was deployed and we were able to give them all the tools that they have today, and they did not have to go through attestations and audits anymore and, when team members were coming in and leaving, all they had to do was put in a ServiceNow request to complete all the work, it was just something so different for them that all that friction just went away. It was one of those simplest things, but one of the biggest things that you can do in your company to protect it.

I don't know if CyberArk really helps with meeting our availability requirements, but it definitely helps a lot with managing the accounts and managing the credentials. Availability? It helps to an extent. If there is an event of some sort, yes, you can always go back and look at the logs and you can figure out through recordings what happened. But it's more about manageability than availability.

In addition, when we started with RPA, there was a requirement that every credential and the bots themselves be protected through the PAM system. From the get-go, we've had CyberArk in the middle. We use standard products for RPA and all credentials are managed through CyberArk. All bots are protected via CyberArk, through PSM, and also through CCP calls. We've got a pretty robust RPA implementation with our PAM platform. Users, bots, the credentials — everything is managed via our PAM solution. From a cost perspective, this was something that was a requirement, so cost was never really an issue here.

The solution's ability to secure robots’ privileged access is pretty good. We've been able to secure our bots. In fact, we take care of our bots right from a development environment, using our development instances. So when our developers are building the scripts around those bots, they're already aware of what's going to happen when things finally go into production. Obviously, the level of security doesn't need to be the same, but we do it through the complete lifecycle.

PSM has been one of the most valuable features. We started on this journey a while back. Initially, when we did not have PSM, we started with AIM and that was our first use case. But an audit came along and we had to go towards something a little bit better and we had to migrate more applications. PSM came along and did exactly what we needed it to do. To take care of all the deficiencies that we had, PSM was the right thing to do.

We work with CyberArk's customer success team and we work with its engineering team back in Israel. We've been doing things on CyberArk which a lot of its customers, we know, have not been doing.

The one place where we found that this product really needs to improve is the cloud. Simple integrations don't exist, even today. We don't have anything specific on CyberArk for managing SaaS products, SaaS vendors, and SaaS credentials. I understand it's a vendor-based thing and that they have to coordinate with the other vendors to be able to do that, and there are integrations coming, but these are the major places where CyberArk definitely needs to invest some more time. Because this is what the future is. You're not going to have a lot of on-prem applications. Most stuff is going to the cloud.

Not every product is 100 percent stable. CyberArk does have some issues once in a while. But the core product, the vault system, has been extremely stable. We haven't had a single problem since we got this thing deployed, and it's been more than six years now. We've not had a single problem with the vault. 

Related to the software, there are other things that can cause problems. You could have clusters going down or you could have issues with hardware, but the product itself has been very stable. 

There are the usual quirks you have sometimes with PSM, but it's been a very stable product for what we need it to be.

In terms of the product's ability to manage all our access requirements at scale, about 80 percent of it can be managed. There is no product in the market which can say, "We can do 100 percent, we can do everything." Or, they say that they can, but when it comes to it, it doesn't really happen. But with CyberArk, we've had the benefit of it being a little scalable, plus very easy to configure for the different use cases we have. So we can cover around 80 percent. But then we have to put some compensating controls around the other 20 percent.

It has scaled for our use cases. We built it according to the very large specification and it has scaled. It has done exactly what we need it to do. We've not yet had a performance issue to date.

We've had good relationships with their technical department. My team usually does more engineering. We work with CyberArk's customer success team more often than the regular technical support. My operations team usually deals more with tech support.

When it has really come down to major issues, if we've ever had a Sev 1, they've been on point. They have picked up the phone, they've called us and they've helped us.

We did not use a different product. We had an in-built vaulting system for managing our own credentials. We've been a CyberArk customer for a while. We had the document vault. Privileged Access had just come out and CyberArk was one of the easiest choices we could make at that time. That's how we decided to go with it.

The initial setup was not straightforward. The very first setup that we did was specifically for AIM, which was obviously simpler. We had an in-built vault which we replaced with the AIM setup. 

Our PSM setup was very complex. We had about 450 applications that we had to onboard over a period of one year, and we had to remove close to 16,000 accounts. It was a very complicated setup. We built close to 35 different connection components to get this product in.

The total cost of ownership, over credentials, is definitely something that goes down if you have a vaulting system. But if you have deployed it correctly, that's the only time you can get that. We've definitely seen some improvements. There are additional costs associated with getting every application onboarded, but in the long run, it keeps the company secure and I don't think you can put a price on that.

We use the solution with AWS. In fact, we set up a custom setup for AWS. We worked with the CyberArk engineering team to get it working, to come up with a custom solution to integrate our AWS EC2 instances. There were some limitations, as I mentioned earlier, with how the product integrates with AWS, so we had to make some major changes to how the integration works. As far as monitoring is concerned, it's standard CyberArk monitoring. We don't see anything specific to AWS, as far as the monitoring is concerned. This is the one place where CyberArk can improve.

Privileged access management is one part of IM. Anything that goes through has to get approved through the IM team, and our product of choice for privilege access is CyberArk. When we decided to go to the cloud, this was the natural choice because this was the product that the enterprise uses. We've had challenges. We've had to customize the product to meet our requirements. It might not be the same for every customer because our requirements are a little unique. But it eventually worked out. We've been able to meet most of our use cases.

CyberArk is an eight out of 10. It can do a lot. But there is definitely scope for improvement.

I come from the IM world, but I was more into access management. CyberArk was just one of those products which was thrust on me. Now I'm head of privileged access management, so CyberArk has been pretty good for me, going from the access management space to privileged access management. It's definitely had an impact on my career.

We mainly use it to protect servers from inappropriate access and ransomware.

We started with on-prem solutions years ago. Our most recent implementations were done in data centers and the cloud. However, we are not in the cloud for CyberArk.

It is a really valuable tool. From the very beginning of my career in cybersecurity, I found that CyberArk is one of the best solutions that I could recommend to our customers. While it is usually seen as an access and identity management solution, it is a cybersecurity and cyber defense tool from my colleague's and my point of view.

It is a single tool that isolates possible kinds of malware. You get lateral movement blocking and auditing information, e.g., you know who is doing what. You are getting protections from the service as well as a useful environment. All your admins can easily go in and out of your company while accessing your servers in a secure way, even if they are working abroad.

One of the best points is that it gives you full control for all the use cases in your infrastructure, in terms of servers, applications, social networks, batch processes, etc. 

It gives you the ability to know what is happening, who is executing everything, and recover that information over time. Everything is recorded there. This is useful, not only for auditing proposes, but for admins and users. This also helps with troubleshooting. For instance, an application or system starts failing at 4:30 in the morning on a Sunday. Usually, the first questions that you ask yourself is, "What changed at 4:30? What has happened? Who was touching that server?" WIth CyberArk, you have the ability to search for that information and find it in minutes. It is really useful for troubleshooting.

The PPA from CyberArk provides a lot of information about access and allows for possible detection of fraudulent use or different tries of accessing, even for family Internet users. Thus, it gives you another source of information regarding risk.

We are using Secrets Manager with some of our customers. We are using it mainly for containers and DevOps. This secure access is really important, and becoming more important every day. We are constantly moving customers to the cloud. Every day, containers are more important for our customers as they extend into microservices, etc. 

The possibility to integrate with the DevOps cycle is vital right now. Sometimes, containers are deployed while some clients have them very protected. They have a lot of things with Panorama, Microsoft, etc. That is a risk because you are deploying things quickly, along with errors and other things that you are developing. So, having to use hard-coded passwords here would be a big mistake. 

Secrets Manager accelerates a lot of the possibilities and simplifies the process, since development teams just need to use credentials. When they arrive on a project, there are new people or resources in their development teams. Thanks to CyberArk, they just need to manage their identities to have access to everything. They don't need to receive credentials nor search for them. They have everything the day that they start working.

We find it easy to use CyberArk PAM to implement least privilege entitlements. We usually do some interviews at the very beginning with different teams to understand their real needs. We define saves and different AV groups for the kind of users that we are going to prepare. Then, the process to assign permissions to different groups is really easy and straightforward. If you want to change or reduce access, that can be easily changed at any moment.

I have been using it for more than 10 years.

In the last year, it has been a very stable platform.

Scalability is fantastic. It has been really easy to scale. In fact, most of our customers who start, or have doubts about how to start, we propose to them, "Well, if you are not sure or don't have the budget right now, you can start with a small deployment, then we will grow." It easily grows and you can add components. 

Other customers have started with a small CPD deployment, then replicated. We put high availability on another CPD. It is really good for public clouds.

We have some customer environments that are over 10,000 servers as well as some environments with more than 50,000 managed identities.

I would rate their technical support as eight out of 10. They are usually really good and quick about answering any questions that you raise. However, they are sometimes not flexible with things. For instance, from one day to another, there might be something that had been done years ago by CyberArk, then they say, "We do not support that." You then have to initiate a complaint and start working with them. Things might become complicated and months pass while you are working with them. Usually, they are good and fast, but sometimes they seem to be blocked with problems, e.g., you will suddenly be working with another team instead of the team that you were working with the day before.

Positive

I have been working with CyberArk and with the CyberArk teams for years. They have been able to adapt the solutions that they have developed or bought. They have grown a lot with the acquisition of different companies. They have been able to adapt them, make them valuable, and helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward because we have a lot of experience with it. While there are a lot of components, I don't find it difficult.

A deployment can typically be done in less than a week, but it does depend on the environment.

We have developed our own methodology for the implementation and deployment of CyberArk. We put the final users at the center of their strategy. One of the things that we have found that fails when deploying a PAM solution is that everyone focuses on the tool. CyberArk works and we know the tool is there, so we just focus on how the different groups are working with their servers, applications, etc. We focus on adapting the deployment in a way that does not disrupt their jobs. We try to be non-disruptive and not change the way users work.

We adapt the solution to already existing workflow processes, tools, accesses, etc. This is one of the best parts of CyberArk. It provides a lot of flexibility to adapt.

The main problem for the tool is its licensing. I work for a really big company. When you try to develop this as a service, usually you work with leverage teams who are formed with dozens of members. You might dedicate one FTE, or less, for something, e.g., an antivirus administrator. You might have half an FTE's effort dedicated to administering the antivirus, but then you have a team of about 30 users who might access that ticket. The problem is that CyberArk eliminated the possibility of concurrent users years ago. This is a big problem for companies who work with leverage teams.

You need to pay for everyone. 40 licenses are used by 20 or 30 people. This is a big problem because licenses are not precisely cheap.

It provides the broadest point of view for privileged access management solutions in the market. We have tested several other proposals and tools for our customers and ourselves. There is a huge difference with using CyberArk.

We evaluated CA PAM and another solution. The main difference is that they cover just a part of the solution. They promise the solution will be very simple to deploy because they only have a simple appliance. However, they are actually really difficult to deploy for an entire project as well as give you value. We have experienced a lot of support and integration problems. You need to do a lot of things by yourself. Whereas, in CyberArk, you have plenty of plugins and developed material in the marketplace. 

This is the big difference at the moment. When you are deploying, it seems like a very simple project, and the other solutions will tell you, "Well, it's just an appliance," and then it becomes a nightmare. Whereas, CyberArk does what it does. You need to deploy several servers, but it works.

From time to time, people in the market are like, "Wow, it was born as a cloud-native solution." Sometimes, this is real and means something, but usually it is mostly a marketing thing. Why would we ignore all a solution's previous experience just for something born in the cloud? Most of the IT solutions that we use in the cybersecurity market are not born in the cloud. For instance, if you go with Securonix or Sentinel, there is a huge difference in the way they were conceived and the way they were born. Just because something is cloud-native or new doesn't mean that it is good. I wouldn't go for something that is cloud-native, just because it is.

I would rate CyberArk as nine out of 10. I won't give the 10 because I have my problems with the licensing. However, the solution is completely recommendable and a must-have in every environment.

I work in the cybersecurity team. We typically provide access to other end users or IT administrators through this solution. We monitor their activity on servers, provision access, and review all logs.

By implementing this solution, we wanted identity management and access management.

Over these three years, there have been a lot of improvements. User management is more efficient. The interface is user-friendly, and I can create comprehensive reports.

Session recordings and timestamps are valuable features. They allow me to specifically select the time a particular command was executed, so I do not have to review the entire recording. I can click on events to determine where and when they happened. 

We are looking for improvements in user provisioning, such as access provisioning and revoking access. We still have to test these improvements in the latest version. 

Updates have been somewhat difficult, resulting in challenges when moving from one version to another. The current version includes automatic updates for minor patches, which should be easy.

I have been using the solution for more than three years.

It has been stable so far, so I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Its scalability is very good. It is in the cloud, so we can just expand it. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We haven't used customer support so far apart from implementation.

Neutral

I have not used any PAM solutions apart from this one.

Its implementation was very complex. It needs different servers and setup parameters involving load balancers, certification, encryption keys. The implementation took more than a month.

It requires maintenance once in six months and has been hard previously.

It was implemented by inhouse staff with oversight from vendor.

When it comes to compliance and audits the ROI on this is very good.

Licensing is little hard as they are perpetual and can't be used from a pool of resources.

I would recommend implementing CyberArk Privileged Access Manager as it is the best so far.

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

I use the solution mainly for credential tasks. For instance, if the company I work for has recent data stored in a privileged report and needs security from cyber attackers, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is used. The solution helps provide access only to authorized users and rotate passwords every sixty or ninety days. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager also allows the configuration of the password either manually or automatically. 

In our organization, Privileged Session Managers (PSM) assist in recording sessions of a particular server using the solution. The product allows users to utilize different permissions, such as end-user, auditor, and administrator permissions. For CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, administrators have the major access to implement tasks like creating, changing, rotating the password and adding new users. 

The most valuable feature of this tool is the password rotation feature. Another vital feature of the solution is the Safe feature, which acts as a container. Only accounts included within the Safe can access a particular server. 

The solution allows the distinguished use of PSM and PSMP for a Windows and Linux server, respectively. The tool makes all session recordings compulsory and cannot be tampered with. It also eliminates hard-coded credentials and supports demand-based applications.  

CyberArk is very popular and provides a lot of features compared to competitors' PAM tools, which is why many customers are migrating to CyberArk's Privileged Access Manager. 

The solution should be able to completely mitigate internal threats. For instance, if an employee of a company saves the CyberArk passwords in a system, then another employee might be able to use it and log in, so there remains an internal threat when using the solution.  

The feature of giving user access through a Safe should be modified. The solution should allow users access directly through an account, and the Safe concept needs to be improved. 

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for the past two years. 

In my organization, about ninety to one hundred people are using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. 

It's easy to setup and install CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Multiple components need to be installed for the solution. Often, the PVWA, PSM, and CPM need to be installed. If an organization has a Linux account, then PSMP needs to be installed for using the solution. While installing the solution, the Vaults need to be defined, if it's a standalone Vault or a cluster Vault. A cluster Vault is mostly implemented for disaster recovery to replicate data when something happens to the main Vault. 

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager comes at a high cost. But the solution is worth its price. 

I would recommend the solution to others depending on their goals. If the aim is to protect an organization's data and use PAM, then one should use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. If the goals include detecting malicious activity, onboarding privileged accounts, and maintaining data accounts, then an organization should adopt the solution.   

I have used the solution's session monitoring capabilities to monitor user activities. The solution's session monitoring feature can be useful for monitoring a user while the person logs in or performs other molecular activities.  

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is difficult and time-consuming to learn in comparison to other IAM tools. There are multiple components, like the vault, that need to be understood before using the solution. But basic administrator tasks like onboarding accounts and rotating passwords will be easy for a beginner user of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. A beginner-level user of the solution may face challenges with secret rotating, management and AIM handling.  

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

We use CyberArk to manage our privileged accounts, our passwords for our critical infrastructure. We have a lot of root administrator level accounts and other application and node accounts that are critical to our business. We use CyberArk to keep those rotated, keep them secure, in an encrypted environment giving us a lot more control and auditing capability.

We are not planning to utilize CyberArk to secure infrastructure for applications running in the cloud because, in our particular business, we like to keep things in-house. Although we have a very small use case scenario where we have one application published to a cloud service, for the vast majority of our infrastructure, we keep it in-house and manage it ourselves.

In terms of utilizing CyberArk's secure application credentials or endpoints, I'd have to think through what CyberArk means by "endpoints," exactly. We do some application management right now. We're mostly doing more server-router, switch, node. And we have some custom vendor nodes that are not your normal off-the-shelf things, that we're trying to get under management right now. As we move along and become more secure, we'll probably do more and more of the application management like that.

It has given us a common environment where all of our critical infrastructure credentials can be stored. From the pure usability and administrative perspective, I can't imagine doing what we do without it. And we're a fairly small business. We don't have 10,000 servers or 5,000 systems to manage. Still, the smaller the business, the smaller the company, the smaller the number of support people you have. So we still end up with a lot of people having to do a lot of work. 

I would say the security, having all the credentials in one place, having a two-factor login to the system available to us, which we use, and then that administrative aspect of it, being able to lighten our administrative load, so once we hand over certain things to CyberArk, that administrative work is done by CyberArk and not by us anymore. It enables us to get a lot more done with a smaller crew.

The first thing that pops into my head is, when you're dealing with some old-school people who have been around our business for many, many decades, who are accustomed to writing down passwords on pieces of paper on their desk, getting those people off of the desktop and into an encrypted environment, that alone, is an enormous improvement.

We literally had people, just a few years ago, who would have pieces of paper written with everything - address, username, password - sitting in plain sight on their desktop that the janitor at night could come in and see laying on their desk. Just within the last few years, I've even seen higher-level people who have the little sticky note out on their desktops, on top of their screen, with credentials. It's all electronic but, still, you get to their desktop or you look over their shoulder and you see everything.

Going from that to having an encrypted environment, that alone was a huge improvement. Working with a lot of people who have been around the business for a long time, who have more of an old-school mentality, getting those credentials moved into a more secure environment and getting them rotated automatically, that's a huge improvement by itself.

The basic features are, themselves, highly useful. I was just saying to some CyberArk people that I came to understand fairly early on that CyberArk is not just an IT security or cybersecurity tool. It's also an administrator tool.

I had a fair number of systems where the passwords were not fully managed by CyberArk yet, and they were expiring every 30 or 45 days. I was able to get management turned on for those accounts. From an administrator perspective, I didn't have to go back into those systems and manually change those passwords anymore. CyberArk was taking that administrator task away from me and handling it, so it lightened the load on our administrative work.

It is a good security tool, but it's also a great administrator tool in that respect.

Things that they were speaking about, here at the Impact 2018 conference, are things that we've already been looking it. They have been on our radar, things like OPM. We're beginning to use PSMP a little bit ourselves. We already have that implemented, but we haven't been using it a lot. The number one thing might be OPM, that we're looking at, that we think might help us in our business, but we haven't implemented them yet.

There are so many options that are currently available, and there are already efforts, projects within CyberArk, that they're working on right now, that I haven't really had time to think beyond what they're already offering. There are so many things that they have that we're not using yet, that we haven't licensed yet. There is a lot of stuff out there that we could take on that we haven't yet for various reasons, including budgeting.

It's always the need to do a cost-benefit and then doing a business case to management and convincing them that it's something that would be good for us and that it's worth spending the money on.

Right now, it's just trying to implement what's out there and use some of those tools that would give us the most bang for the buck.

Stability is very, very good. We did have a minor incident. It could have been a major incident. The customer support people were spot on in getting us back in order pretty quickly. I think it's a little bug in the version that we're at. That's one of the reasons we need to upgrade right now. We're just trying to decide which version we want to upgrade to before we pull the trigger.

Beyond that, as far as stability and reliability, there really haven't been any major issues. We've had one little incident. We got it mitigated within a very short amount of time thanks to, on that day, really good, quick tech support from CyberArk. And beyond that, it's been a very stable and reliable system. There hasn't been any other downtime that I can point to and say it was CyberArk's fault.

I painted myself into the corner a couple of times, and had to jump through some hoops to get myself back out; those were my fault, a lack of experience.

For the most part, over the two and a half years we've used it, we've just had that one little incident that caused us a little bit of concern. Like I said, it was mitigated very quickly and didn't cause a huge storm within the company and didn't have a huge impact that particular day, fortunately.

We haven't scaled it up much since we took it on. From everything I've seen, I think scalability should be excellent. You can spin up as many component servers as you need to get the job done. Obviously, at some point, licensing is going to come into that. I don't see how scalability would be any kind of problem for anyone. I think you can make it as big or as little as you need it to be.

This is coming from a person who spent two-and-a-half years in customer support, so I do have a certain amount of empathy towards customer support people and the challenges they deal with. It depends on who you get on the other end of the phone. When you call in, you may get the young lady that I got the day we had that major issue. She very quickly found exactly what we needed to do and told us how to do it, and we got the problem settled.

I've had other situations on much more minor issues, like how to configure this or how to make that work and I haven't had as good an experience on all of those. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I think it depends more on who you get rather than on the company in general. Some support reps are always going to be better than others.

I've only had a very small number of experiences with them. When I have an issue like that, I don't just open up a ticket and then leave it alone until they get back with me. I usually go back and continue to dig for a solution. About half the time, I find my own solution anyway. But I don't think it was commonly the case that they were not attempting to get back with me.

Sometimes they didn't always offer, for the less critical issues perhaps, a quick, easy, how-to-implement it solution. This is probably a common thing, but they do ask for a lot of log files, a lot of information. They ask you to provide a lot of information to them before they're willing to give you anything at all upfront. It would be nice if they did a little bit of more give and take upfront of, "Well, why don't you try one or two or three of these common sense things, the first things that pop up on the radar on this type of issue, and see if any of them help? And we'll take the information that you gather and we'll go in the meantime." 

Instead of throwing it all in your lap to go and collect a whole huge collection of data to bring them before they give you anything, perhaps it would be better if they were a little more give-and-take upfront of, "Why don't you try these couple of things while we take your log files and stuff and go research them?" A little bit of that might be more helpful.

We were using KeePass before we got CyberArk, and I can't imagine trying to manage the number of accounts and credentials we have today, and the number of systems, with something like KeePass. It would be a nightmare.

We switched because of the scale of where we were going. All of our infrastructure passwords, prior to three-and-a-half years ago, were decentralized. The people who worked on a particular system managed the passwords for that system in their own particular way. There was no across-the-board system. There was no standard regarding these having to be encrypted versus those. Everybody came up with their own way of handling that. We tried to implement some standards during the years leading up, but they were not mandatory. So people ended up just doing what they wanted to do.

Now, with CyberArk, there is a mandate from upper management that we all use this tool. All the credentials go into it and they are all encrypted. Eventually, everything, 100 percent or as near 100 percent as we can get it, will be under full management.

In terms of criteria for selecting a vendor, from my perspective, I like to be able to find someone who can speak to me on a somewhat technical level and help me work through technical issues. But I also want them to give me a vision of things, the roadmap or other products and other things that are available, without getting too much of a marketing pitchor sales pitch. I don't mind a little bit of that. I know that's important. But at the same time, I don't just want a slick sales presentation. I want to know the technical end of how does this really work? I want to be able to have some vision as to how we might implement that. Not just what it can do for us, but how would we actually go through the machinery, go through the work, to make it work for us.

It's always good to have a vendor that can provide resources, that can speak to someone like me on a technical level, and that can help me work through issues, whether it's lack of experience or just lack of knowledge in a certain area; a vendor that can help me work through some of those situations and get me to where I need to be.

I went through the proof of concept and then I also went through the initial install of our infrastructure. For our company, I've probably done 80 to 90 percent of the work in CyberArk myself.

The implementation was fairly straightforward. We had a really good implementation engineer. He did a really good job. Of course, every individual brings his own kind of approach to things. They give you insight and then you run into someone else that gives you a little different perspective. It surprised me how straightforward some of the setup is. I've experienced some things since then that lead me to think it is something that CyberArk is constantly improving on: How to implement new installs or upgrades and make them better and easier.

For instance, there was one system that, when we first installed in 2016, we were told upfront that this was not an easy system to spin up and get working. We had made an attempt at it and failed. A year later, I installed it by myself from the documentation and it went as smoothly as could be, no problems. They had improved it over that year to the point where just about anybody could do it.

The team that I'm on, we weren't leading up the investigative part. Our security group did that. They're the ones who brought CyberArk to us and said, "This is the one we're going to go with." There was actually another entity within our corporate parent company that had already been using it for about nine months before we did. We adopted it from there. Since then, another entity has adopted it as well.

One big piece of advice I would give is: Don't ignore user acceptance. If you want people to use CyberArk, you have to pay attention to user acceptance. If your users hate it, then your entire experience is going to be an uphill battle, when you're trying to get people to actually use the tool. It doesn't matter how good the tool is, it doesn't matter how well it does password management. It doesn't matter how well it does all these other things. If your users hate it, you're going to have an uphill struggle with the people that you need to be on your side. You've got to get user acceptance right.

Now, you can't completely sacrifice all those other things just for user acceptance, I'm not saying that. But you have got to keep user acceptance up there, alongside everything else. It's got to be a hand-in-hand thing as you go along, so don't ignore user acceptance. Spend some time doing it.

I tend to shy away from giving anybody a 10 out of 10. I would rate it at about eight out of 10, a pretty high rating. Anything could be improved, and certainly, CyberArk is not immune to that. But I think it's a good tool.

We use CyberArk to secure the last resort accounts by introducing dual control approval, ticket validation, temporary access, and regular password rotation.

It also allows us to introduce location-aware access controls with multiple sites having access to specific location-protected content.

Finally, the session management capabilities allowed us to introduce delegated accounts to secure access to all sorts of devices in an easy way, but without losing the individual traceability. 

It allows us to comply with the regulator requirements allowing us to operate in the different countries and to fulfil the security and compliance requirements.

In the end, it secures all the highly privileged accounts and protects the company from internal and external threat actors.

The solution is multifaceted and includes session management, password management, temporary access, ticketing validation, API access, single sign-on integration, load balancing, and high availability principles.

The credentials management capability is key to ensuring that the credentials are kept secure and that access to them is done on a temporary and event-driven basis.

The session isolation reduces the risk of exposure of the credentials and applying simpler network controls.

Web access allows the introduction of location-aware controlled access so that different locations can only access the data that is allowed to be retrieved from their sites allowing centralisation but fulfilling the regional requirements.

The product is very vaulting-focused. I'd love to see it expanding its capabilities a bit further into areas like just-in-time elevation, and access with non-vaulted credentials.

The upgrade options are good but could be further simplified.

The high availability options could be improved, and the load distribution as well for both the vaults and the credentials managers.

The web interface should allow having multiple sites for location-aware access control within the same web server.

I've used the solution for more than ten years.