CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews

We're a small IT shop of a few hundred people and the company has only a couple of thousand employees. We had some SharePoint workflows that people had used to get access via submitting a ticket. We had updated those processes by using some DevOps, some JAMS jobs that run in Azure, and they were breaking frequently. We have gotten people to understand now that they can just go to CyberArk. They don't have to submit a ticket, they don't have to go through a workflow, they don't have to put in the right server name or wait for an approval. It's just there. People really like that.

The solution standardizes security and reduces risk-access across the company. It's what the solution does. It's just a requirement. Standardizing access is taking away the "onesie-twosies." With the DNA scan, you're running a full report of everything on all your servers that you're targeting, or all the servers period, and finding those onesie-twosies accounts and getting rid of them. Standardizing and making local accounts on the servers, accounts that have least privilege and that don't have access to anything else, and giving people only that access when they log onto a box; that's pretty cool standardization.

In terms of being able to have a quick win using the solution, we were given a ridiculous deadline to meet an external customer requirement to have privileged access management in place within a couple of months. That was to include signing the purchase order, getting it installed, and having it up day one to take in what we thought were 17 servers. Actually, we found out it was 53 and, two weeks after we had it running, we found out there were upwards of 60 to 70 servers. Getting all those servers in, the accounts in place, by the deadline — even just installing it — was all an immediate win. People said it couldn't be done.

Right off the bat, the most valuable feature is the DNA scan. It gives us the ability to scan our environment and find the accounts that we're going to need to take under control.

We're quite new with CyberArk. We've just installed it this past summer and we've taken off with the Microsoft tier model. Tier 0 is our domain admin accounts and our local admin accounts on some applications are specific to SOX requirements. That's been amazing. It's basic-use PAM, but it's been really fast and easy because of the DNA scan. We knew what was there and we were able to go find who owned those accounts. Step one, step two, step three are really easy.

We're pretty excited about Alero, the third-party access management. As a small company we lean on vendors quite a bit and we do that in multiple areas. That's going to be a big one for us. It's just gone from beta to production. It's one of those things that's on our roadmap, but being so new to the toolset, we're just growing into the tool. We're not quite there yet.

The product has been around forever. In a way, it's a bit old-school. I came from a Windows Server environment, so I get how it's built. It's INI files, it's apps that run on Windows Servers. I'm sure there are other ways that it runs, such as in the cloud as well. There are other directions. But the base of the product is old-school. It just works. So the stability is there. My new engineers can do the install, they can understand how it works. It's quite stable.

In terms of scaling, we're not there yet. We have a number of offices, we're a small company but we're spread globally and we're installing servers in Brazil. We also have servers in London, so we can scale geographically quite easily because it's applications running on servers. There's also a DR capability, having those vaults where needed, so we can scale that way.

There are a lot of new things coming out about endpoints, and third-party management is going to be big. We can scale geographically and we can scale outside of our borders and that's going to be cool.

We had no PAM program when I came to this company.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's well-documented. We sought to have external advisors and third-party consultants help, in addition to CyberArk's help, because we had such tight deadlines. We were installing multiple environments with a turnaround in weeks and had to complete the training at the same time. Junior engineers were coming in and they could walk through it. We found out that it's almost self-doable. But that's probably not advised in any solution. The help was appreciated but it's straight-away easy.

In a previous life, I worked with TPAM, Quest products, and Safeguard. We evaluated five different toolsets when it came to my new role here — all the major players. The last two were Quest and CyberArk and I had a strong relationship with both groups. A lot of it came down to dollars and cents, but CyberArk also had that marketplace that told us that we could do certain things out-of-the-box. That was very important to us, enabling us to get stakeholders' buy-in: strategic alliances within our customers or the companies that we own. We got them bought-in to the idea that they were going to be using this tool. It came down to the marketplace.

I'd never ever rate anything a 10. I'd probably never rate anything a one. I'd rate CyberArk as 7.5 out of 10. We actually did surveys of all the people that saw all the demos of all the new solutions we looked at. CyberArk was a seven or eight consistently, from all the people who watched it. The benefit of it is it's stable, it's old-school, it just works. The downside is that it's a big program. To scale excessively, locally, on an on-prem application, takes a lot of servers. Those are the highs and lows. It could be amazing if it all ran in the cloud, but that wouldn't be possible.

I started as a PAM engineer eight years ago. Learning PAM and understanding how it protects people and being the liaison who needs to take passwords away from engineers is really tough. But it put me in a good spot. I grew from a PAM engineer to an identity engineer to identity team lead to identity manager. Within the last year-and-a-half, I came into this company because of a PAM role. They hired me as an identity manager because I knew PAM and because I had a relationship; I was working on bringing CyberArk in as part of my previous role and they wanted me to come in and do that same evaluation here. So knowing CyberArk got me my job and, within three months, they said, "We don't need just one team like this doing these assessments. We need multiple teams. So you're an associate director." I said, "Thanks, I don't want to do that. I just want to play with PAM."

We use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to manage our privileged accounts because it protects against cyberattacks and prevents unnecessary or illegal access. 

It provides a centralized management system, making it easier for us to enforce policies and monitor access across our organization. Additionally, we can monitor sessions and record and detect suspicious activities that are harmful to our systems and organization.

The AI capabilities, including advanced threat detection features, are very helpful for us. They reduce human effort and errors, allowing us to quickly identify and respond to threats. This solution scales up our IT environment and resolves almost every issue that poses a threat to our organization.

Pricing is a concern for me because it is not very user-friendly for startups, new users, or very small organizations. It might be better if the price was reduced. Sometimes, the maintenance cost can also be high.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for the last one and a half to two years.

Every application has downtime. However, it remains stable overall. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

Sometimes, when I face issues or want to understand some features, or it is difficult to identify activities in our system, I contact the support team. They are very helpful, always available, and try to resolve our issues as soon as possible.

Positive

This is the first PAM solution that I implemented in our organization.

The initial setup is not very easy, nor very difficult. It is moderate to deploy.

It does not require any maintenance from our side.

We have a team of three to five members, and they deployed it in a minimum of one week.

Its price can be reduced.

I researched some solutions and found CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to be one of the good solutions. I am very happy with the product.

I am happy with this product. If someone is looking for a PAM solution, I recommend it because it has a large developer community and good customer support. It is more stable than the others, and I am very happy with it. 

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

Our main use cases for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager are privileged access management and privileged session management. Another use case of the solution is password rotation.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager improved our organization by identifying the owners of the service accounts. Each service account should be associated with an owner because without an owner, that account becomes an orphan account that nobody can take ownership of, so this means nobody would know what that account is doing. When we brought in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, it helped us have a roadmap that allowed account ownership and account onboarding. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager gave us a roadmap, a plan to follow, and a guide on how to manage privileged access, and this is very important because we don't want privileged access to be compromised or breached.

Realizing the benefits of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager was a long journey. It was not an easy journey. It was a long journey to put things in place and get them onboarded because not all applications were compatible. It took six months to a year at least, to start the process properly.

The applications which were in Active Directory were easy, for example, it was easy to onboard the accounts and rotate the passwords because that meant only running scheduled tasks. There were a few accounts, however, where the applications weren't compatible with password rotation, particularly old applications or legacy applications that would break if the passwords were changed. To get all those sorted and to get all those in place, and explain what those changes were, took a lot of time, but for accounts that were just running scheduled tasks or services, those were onboarded easily and had their passwords rotated, particularly those which had identified owners.

One of the features I found valuable in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is privileged session management. It's a feature that allows you to record the session, so if there's a risk, that risk can be highlighted.

I also found it valuable that CyberArk Privileged Access Manager can be integrated with PTA, and this means that it will tell you if there's a risk to the logins and signs of risk and if risky behavior is observed. It's a good feature.

Another good feature is the CPM because it helps you rotate the passwords automatically without involving the admins. It can go and update the scheduled tasks and the services. At the same time, if there's an application where it cannot do all of these, CPM will trigger an automatic email to the application owners, telling them that they should go ahead and change the password. This allows you to manage the account password that CyberArk cannot manage, which helps mitigate the risk of old passwords, where the password gets compromised, and also allows you to manage the security of the domain.

Integration is also a valuable feature of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. It has an application access module function that allows you to integrate and manage applications, including BOT accounts. It also allows you to manage ServiceNow and many other applications.

What could be improved in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is the licensing model. It should be more flexible in terms of the users. Currently, it's based on the number of users, but many users only log in once in four months or once in five months. It would be great if the licensing model could be modified based on user needs. We even have users who have not logged in even once.

Another area for improvement in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is the release of vulnerability patches because they don't release it for all versions. They would say: "Okay, you should upgrade it to this point. The patches are available", but sometimes it is not feasible to do an upgrade instantly for any environment, because it has to go through the change management process and also have other application dependencies. If that can be sorted out, that would be nice.

I've been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for around seven years now.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is a stable solution.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is deployed on-premises in the company, so I'm unable to comment on scalability, but they do have a software as a service model, so that's scalable.

Technical support for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is responsive. As for their timelines for completing tickets, it would depend on the process. Sometimes it takes them less time to respond, and sometimes it takes them longer. They have different levels of support, so if level one is not able to resolve it, they escalate the issue in due time to the next level of support. They're mostly able to help.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, I'm giving their support an eight. There's always room for improvement, and in their case, in terms of support, what they could improve is their response time, especially their response to business-critical activities or issues.

The company was probably using LockBox before using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, but I'm not sure about that.

Installing CyberArk Privileged Access Manager was easy. It's only the firewall you need to introduce into the environment that takes time, particularly if you're doing an on-premises model.

I saw a return on investment from using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. It's a good privilege access management solution and identity and access management solution as a whole. It's a really good product.

The solution was definitely implemented because it saves you time and money, for example, access management and privileged access management are now automated when in the past, those processes were done manually. The new feature CyberArk DNA was also given free of charge, so that DNA tool can scan the environment for all the vulnerable accounts for password hash attacks, for accounts where the passwords were not changed. That definitely saves time, because that type of scanning would be very difficult for someone to do manually, and the report that comes out of that scan is very objective.

I'm not involved in the purchase of the CyberArk Privileged Access Manager licenses, so I'm unable to comment.

I was not part of the evaluation process.

I recently switched jobs, so I was working with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager in my previous organization, and also using it in my current organization. I'm using version 12.2 of the solution.

In terms of maintenance, it can be monitored through SCOM Monitoring, but the vault is standalone. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager can enable SNMP Traps so that the vault can be monitored automatically and it can trigger an incident to the ticketing tool the teams are using. It has the ability for automated monitoring.

My advice to others looking into implementing CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is to know their network properly. If they're doing an on-premises deployment, they should know their network properly, and they should first audit their environment in terms of the accounts they're going to manage on CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. They should also assign the owners and assign everything beforehand to help make implementation faster.

I'm rating CyberArk Privileged Access Manager nine out of ten.

My company uses CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault for privileged access management, a domain that the product fits under. CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault involves password rotations, recording of sessions, keystrokes, and securing sessions, which all come under the same category in the solution.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it's the best in the market. I haven't seen any other PAM solutions better than CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's GUI has certain shortcomings that need improvement.

I have been using CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault for two years. I use the solution's latest version.

It is a stable solution, but sometimes its GUI lags if the load gets too much. If you try to click some buttons, responding will take five seconds instead of just responding immediately.

It is a highly scalable solution.

My company has around 500 uses of the solution and 3,000 to 4,000 accounts, which can be scaled up to 10,000 or 15,000 accounts.

My company does not have plans to increase the usage of the solution.

I am not an admirer of the product's technical support team. The product's technical support team doesn't know the product well enough to give customers suggestions, so they need to work on that part.

BeyondTrust and LastPass were the two solutions I had used in the past.

The initial setup of CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is quite complicated, but if you follow the documentation, I don't think you should have any issues. The issues are only with the solution's support team and the GUI.

The initial deployment just takes about five days to a week if you have got all the network architecture right.

If you don't get the network architecture right, then the deployment could take two or three weeks.

For the deployment process, you should ensure you have some open IP ranges because CyberArk needs to talk to the cloud at its end, so you need to allow certain IPs to make certain connections, after which you need infrastructure and servers in place.

There is a Zip file for your environment, like an image you download from their website, which CyberArk's partners can access. Once you download the Zip file, there are a few scripts to run, and if the scripts run properly, your environment will be set up properly, after which you deploy the connector.

There is a need for an architect who is an expert in CyberArk and networking for the deployment and maintenance, along with one senior engineer.

The ROI for the solution is good because if you deploy the product, then you will not face any issues for five to ten years, especially if you manage it well.

Payments have to be made on a yearly basis toward the licensing costs of the solution.

I would say that the solution is expensive because it's only preferred by the top-tier companies involved in banking or insurance who have no problem with budgets for their cybersecurity. A medium or small-sized company would prefer to use some other solution over CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault.

was not part of the evaluation process in my company. I wouldn't know why my company chose CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault over other products. I can say that I am comfortable with CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it. I suggest that CyberArk's potential users invest in getting their own IT environments working perfectly before involving a team of CyberArk-certified engineers since it makes the process a lot easier. If you don't follow the aforementioned steps, then you will find yourself going back and forth to the product's support team, which will take you ages because they take time to respond.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

From an industry perspective, you continue to see the headlines in the media about how bad actors have been able to take advantage of weak policies and security controls around access management within companies.  In these cases, the focus has been around employees that can access the most sensitive information, or have access to the very controls that operate and protect the firm.  Products like CyberArk, that provide controls for privileged access, have helped mitigate the threat of taking over those accounts that have the greatest amount of risk to an organization, particularly for those who are system administrators and have the highest powers in being able to access all levels of the technology infrastructure.

When it comes to the product's ability to standardize security and reduce risk across the entire enterprise, standardization is all about simplifying the complexity of IT threats and risks and it's all about the standardization of the controls that you have in place. If you have a product set that enables you to provide security, and it is consistently applied across a specific user base, then you have standardization which drives both enhanced security through the privileged access controls, and efficiency through the standardization of your operating model.

Availability is an interesting challenge, but it is part of an IT Risk Strategy.  When it comes to Cybersecurity, Privileged Access control is the ability to manage IT risk associated with the most powerful access to your infrastructure services.  This IT Risk can manifest itself as compromised information, manipulated data, or disruption of your IT based services. A Privileged Access Security product reduces the threat of stolen credentials and account takeovers of those profiles that would have the power to take down your enterprise.   Therefore, it not only reduces the risk to your firm, but also drastically improves availability. 

The most valuable features are its simplicity and the ease of implementation. When you think about privileged access management and the complexity of solving privileged access for those system administrators in your organization, CyberArk is a product that helps you simplify that problem and implement a standard set of security controls to protect the enterprise.  

In terms of the products ability to manage Privileged Access control requirements at scale; scale is really a function of two influences, which would either be the size of your infrastructure, or the complexity of your organizations operating model for those that have privileged access to your infrastructure services.  CyberArk scales quite readily across a large organization and through proper design and engineering is capable of expanding across a variety of use cases.  Like any technology control implementation however, it is always important to ensure you review and optimize the organizations support operating model, in order to ensure that you have the most optimal design and implementation of CyberArk.  

CyberArk has captured the individual privileged access space well. They've captured the application-to-application and DEVOPS space quite well.. They should continue to invest in optimizing the services, and help companies drive down risk associated with application based passwords, as this is an industry that is being closely watched by external regulators. 

CyberArk continues to stay close to the industry and are always looking for ways to improve  their products and service offerings accordingly.  There are 3 areas that I would call out, that CyberArk should continue to focus on:

1) Continue to help organizations understand how they align their strategies and roadmaps to industry trends and the overall cybersecurity threat landscape. 

2) Continue to help the industry innovate on talent , and position customers to be more successful in supporting their CyberArk implementations. 

3) Continue to help customers understand the Risk reduction capabilities and scorecards associated with their deployments.  Initiatives like the CyberArk Blueprint will help enable enable informed customers. 

The perceived stability of CyberArk is quite dependent on the complexity of the environment it is implemented in, and the overall design of the infrastructure, including both PSM and Vault technologies.  As an infrastructure it is quite stable; however, in complex network infrastructure environments, sporadic network disruptions could create issues accessing the various CyberArk network devices.

Scalability is a function of both technology growth, and integration capability.  CyberArk has not only continued to advance the infrastructure robustness of their software solutions, but through the C3 alliance they have also created integration opportunities with other IT Security and Access Mgmt products that allow companies to provide a full ecosystem of IT controls within their organizations.    This also provides an opportunity for companies to consider best of breed products, like CyberArk, and not have to restrict their decisions to a small set of technology tools that do not provide comprehensive Privileged Access Services.

CyberArk is a growing company and their technical support has continued to grow and mature across the organization. The one thing I'll say that CyberArk has been able to do is to continue to keep in touch with its customers and look into areas where there's opportunity to continue improving their technical support across the organization. CyberArk works with an integrated model: They have integrators within firms that will implement the product. But at some point, you always need to refer back to the software owners of the product to make sure that you're comfortable that what you've designed and implemented is in keeping with what their blueprint would have recommended in the first place. In addition, their technical support has continued to mature and grow to help customers become successful in their deployments.

What is complex is privileged access management. When companies look at implementing a software solution for privileged access management, if they actually haven't looked at the complexities of privileged access within their own organization — and I'm speaking more in terms of the business processes for that type of access across the organization — then any software tool is going to look complex because it's not going to solve the problem.

If a firm focuses on understanding their existing Privileged Access operating model, the inherent business processes, and the risk & pervasiveness of Privileged Access across their enterprise, then they will be better positioned to understand the business problem they need to solve.  CyberArk will then become a capability that enables them to solve their IT Risk issues with privileged access, and capitalize on the efficiencies with their new operating model.  The complexity seldom ever lies in the technology. It always lies in how well it integrates with the business processes that the firm is trying to solve as part of its deployment.

Privileged Access Management is a business transformation program.  It forces business to look at their overall operating model for system administrative and application based access, and develop a strategy that reduces risk overall to the enterprise. Once this strategy is completed, and a new operating model is conceived, CyberArk software and services becomes a very effective series of controls that enable the business to secure the most sensitive access to services, and allows the organization to operate within their risk tolerance. 

Far too often companies will treat the CyberArk product set as a software implementation, that becomes overly complex and evolves into a multi-year program. This is due in part to the legacies of technology programs, where the implementation will force business to rethink their operating model, and therefore delays, scope changes and cost of overall program becomes associated with the software implementation initiative. This is a consequence of positioning a Privileged Access program as a security software implementation, and not a true business transformation initiative. 

While CyberArk continues to adjust its licensing costs and continues to look at the comparisons in the industry and the ability to effectively and affordably help companies and firms solve their privileged access problems, companies also have to look at the overall cost of what a privileged access program means to their firm, and what shareholder value they gain as a result of implementing those types of products or services or business processes. In that context, they should start to look at what the comparison is against the software that they're using to enable those very controls they're trying to implement.

I've spent some time with BeyondTrust. I've spent some time with Centrify. I've had their products in for different instances and different purposes. They play an interesting concentric role in some of the areas that they focus on, but I wouldn't say I have one-to-one experience in other product sets.

CyberArk continues to innovate, as they refine strategies based on industry research and trends in the cyber security landscape, and incorporate the necessary updates to both their roadmaps as well as their product sets. The creation of the customer implementation roadmap, acquisition of Conjur for DEVOPS and the development of  Alero to address 3rd party secured access, are examples of product innovation to address  emerging risks within the  industry.  

I would rate CyberArk 8 our of 10;  although I do remain impressed with their existing set of product offerings, their cyber security roadmap & strategy, and their overall corporate philosophy, I do feel it is necessary for them to ensure they remain vigilant and maintain pace with an evolving cyber industry.  Significant disruption in the technology industry brought on by advancements in Machine Learning / AI, commoditization of cyber attack tools, and rapid deployment of IoT based technologies, summon the need to ensure companies do not become complacent in the agility of their security tools.

I have several passions. One of the passions I've always had is in organizational transformation and leadership. A second is really around the space for identity and access management. CyberArk has allowed me to continue, even after I've retired from the industry after 35 years, to still live that passion through their customers. I've been given the opportunity to provide some keynotes around organizational transformation. It's an exciting industry to be in and CyberArk has allowed me the benefit of still continuing to enjoy that experience.

The primary use case is, of course, that we do the EPV for password vaulting and security changing, and prior to version 10 we were excited and it functioned perfectly fine. There are a few glitches with version 10 that we are not really happy with, but the functionality itself still exists and it's working like it should.

We actually have our vaults in the cloud. I don't know if we have any applications in the cloud that we're planning on managing, yet. We're not really a big AIM shop just yet, so I don't know if we're planning on utilizing CyberArk to secure infrastructure applications running in the cloud.

We're looking forward to utilizing CyberArk to secure application credentials and endpoints, however right now we have three or four AIM licenses.

It increases the security posture across the entire enterprise because it's not only helping to secure those infrastructure accounts but it's also helping to secure our user accounts as well.

It requires a lot more auditing and monitoring and checks. So if you don't have the right approvals, you can't get the credentials you need to do what you need to do. So if you don't have authorization, of course you can't get them anyway. In total, it's making the environment more secure. The security posture is a lot better.

I love the ability to customize the passwords: the forbidden characters, the length of the password, the number of capital, lowercase, and special characters. You can customize the password so that it tailor fits, for example, mainframes which can't have more than eight characters. You can say, "I want a random password that doesn't have these special characters, but it is exactly eight characters," so that it doesn't throw errors. 

And then, of course, the users have the ability to rotate those passwords on a daily basis with a Reconcile Account. Or, if they want to do one-time password checkouts, we can manage those, check in, check out. I like the flexibility of the changing of the password, specifically.

PSM is pretty cool, but my favorite part is I get to secure your passwords that you get to use either with or without PSM.

We had an issue with the Copy feature. Of course when we do the password rotation we restrict users' ability to show a copy of their passwords for some cases, and in other cases they actually need that ability, but we would prefer them to copy to the clipboard and then paste it where it needs to go - as opposed to showing and it typing it somewhere and you have the whole pass the hash situation going. But apparently, in version 10, that Copy feature does not work. You actually have to click Show and then copy the password from within Show and then paste it. We've had a million tickets and we had to figure out a workaround to it. 

Then there is the failed authentication now. I don't know if that was a glitch or if that was an update, because I know sometimes you don't really want to tell a person when their account has been suspended because if I'm a hacker, maybe I'm just thinking I have the wrong password. When the account is locked you don't actually want them to know the account is suspended. However, since we are the CyberArk support within our organization, we need to know that the password is suspended and we won't know that unless we have the ITA log up.

So when a user calls and says, "Hey, I'm locked out of CyberArk, I can't get into CyberArk," we have to go through all of these other troubleshooting steps because the first thing we don't think of right now is, "The account is suspended," because normally we would be told that the account is suspended. They would take a screenshot of the error and it would say, 'Hey, user is suspended, station is suspended for user so-and-so." It doesn't say that anymore. So now it just says "Failed authentication." And that could be because they might not be in the right groups in Active Directory, they might not have RSA. It could be so many different things, where before, they would be able to say, "Yeah, I'm suspended." And we could say, "Okay, we can fix that in two minutes." We just log in to PrivateArk and enable your account and you're fine. Now we're saying, "Maybe we should check PrivateArk first, just in case," to make sure you're not suspended. It's going to be a whole rabbit hole that we fall into, simply because we're not given that information upfront.

In terms of future releases, I would love to be a partner again and get a temporary license that I can put back in my home lab because my license expired. I would like to play with 10.4. I want to see it and feel it out and see if I can break it because my rule of thumb is, if I can break it, I can fix it. That is one of the things I like about CyberArk, especially over CA PAM, because with CA PAM you get no view into the back-end on how it's configured and how it's built and how it works. With CyberArk, they literally give you everything you need and say, "Hey, this is your puppy. Raise it how you want." You get to see the programming and you get to configure and everything. I've broken several environments, but I'm pretty good at fixing them now because I know how I broke them.

Prior to version 10, I was gung-ho CyberArk. I wish we would have waited until version 10.7 as opposed to 10.3. But for the most part it's stable, it's just that there are glitches in the matrix right now. We'll have to work those out.

I have worked with both CyberArk and what was formerly Xceedium and is now CA PAM, and in my opinion, I'm gung-ho CyberArk. CA PAM is not scalable like that at all. I love the fact that the different components can be installed in multitude or in singularity on different servers.

I understand the concept of it being an appliance, and technically it is an appliance because of how CyberArk hardens everything. But the fact that I can put my vault here in a central location on one net for example, and I'll have a CPM in California, a CPM in Texas, a CPM in New York, a CPM in Florida, and actually be able to grow with my company and not necessarily have to continue to grow my vault until I get to a certain number accounts - yet I can still manage everything across the country, if not the world - I love that. I love the flexibility and the capability of being able to pull those components out.

I'm not a fan of technical support with CyberArk. It's like jumping through red tape and hoops. Quite frankly, it's almost like when you call CyberArk you get the Help Desk or the level-one. I'm a level-one. I got the CCD, I know how to do the initial troubleshooting. When I call CyberArk it's because I can't figure the problem out. So I need a level-two, three, four. I don't need you to tell me, "Hey, open a ticket and then give me logs."

I would like to say, "Can I get a WebEx please? Can you just look at this because I can tell you exactly what I did and how I did it, and then I just need you to help me fix it, because we've been doing this for about 30 minutes now, and when it gets to an hour it's going to start costing my customers money. So can we fix this today rather than tomorrow?" I'm not the biggest fan of tech support.

I have had experience with CA PAM. That's the only other password vaulting technology that I've used so far. I've used SailPoint IdentityIQ, but that's not really password vaulting. Apparently, there is a partnership growing that allows you to provision CyberArk through SailPoint, which I worked on with the CDM project - and it was a headache last year. So I'm excited about the new CM technology that they have that's allowing for that integration, but other than that, I haven't really done much.

I have done several installations for the CDM contract of CyberArk and I've done several upgrades as well.

The installation is as straightforward as it comes. There are some glitches, but it's not with CyberArk, it's with the environment that I'm installing in. In that environment they don't ever follow directions, so we have to get there and say, "We need you to rebuild your vault because you did it from an image and not from the CD, and it's not supposed to have any GPOs, it's not supposed to be on the domain. CyberArk tells you this in their paperwork. We told you this." But, of course, they don't listen. We get there and they spend a day telling us, "Hey, we have to rebuild our server." And we say, "Okay, well thanks for those eight hours. I appreciate it."

The biggest return on investment would be the security itself. I've seen ethical hackers that attempted to infiltrate a component or a department in the agency and they were stopped at the gate. They tried every which way they could and they just couldn't get the passwords they needed to get to the elevated accounts to get to where they wanted to go. So it was just great to see CyberArk in action.

Do your research. That would be my biggest advice. CyberArk is a great tool. However, it is not the only tool that does what it does and, in some cases, for a lot of people, other passport vaulting tools are more toward what they would need in their environment.

I would give CyberArk an eight out of 10, and the two missing points would probably be mostly because of technical support. I would love to actually get the support that I asked for. I would love to actually get the help that I'm asking you for as opposed to you telling me, "Yes, I can help you. I need you to fill out these papers and jump through that hoop and then cut a cartwheel and rub your belly while you pat your head at the same time." If it wasn't for that, it would be more towards a 10.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• credibility
• functionality.

In my organization, we are using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to enhance the security of an organization's critical systems, mainly by securing privileged accounts (e.g. administrator passwords, SSH keys, and API tokens). 

We are also using Cyber-Ark for access control by ensuring that only authorized personnel can access privileged accounts and sensitive systems. 

very important for us is also Session Recording and Monitoring. We can record and monitor privileged user sessions in real time for auditing purposes. 

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager significantly improved our organization's security. Mainly, it has enhanced our ability to secure privileged accounts. Centralized management of identities ensures that credentials are stored securely. Also, the automated rotation of passwords reduces the risk of leaks.

The session recording feature adds great value and helps with auditing administrative activities.

CyberArk PAM can be easily automated, which saves a lot of time and administrative effort.

For our organization, the most valuable features of CyberArk PAM are:

• Credential Management. The automation of the retrieval and injection of credentials into sessions, and automation of password rotation.
• Session Recording. It gives us the possibility to record privileged user sessions for auditing and compliance purposes. 
• Ease of integration. CyberArk can by integrated with multiple systems and applications.
• The possibility of using Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) which increases security
• Reporting module. This allows us to generate reports based on session activity

Cost management. There should be more models and licensing plans for this software. They should also be flexible, allowing you to purchase selected features at a favorable price.

User Experience. The current interface is OK, however, sometimes it is not very intuitive. There is also no possibility of advanced modification and adaptation to your own needs and requirements.

Performance. The performance of the application could be a bit better, especially in the case of remote sessions - delays in remote sessions can be annoying.

I've used the solution for about five years. 

I use the solution for administration. If the customer requires Alero or HTML, we will deploy the solution in that particular environment. Otherwise, if the end users are accessing the solution via VPN or from inside the network, we will not deploy Alero or HTML. We will instead focus on CyberArk's core PAM, which includes the vault password rotation component, the web interface component, the jump server, and PPA. These are CyberArk's four main components which we deploy for every customer.

CyberArk has a lot of modules, such as Enterprise Password Vault, which is the heart of the solution and needs to be up and running at any time. Privileged accounts and session recordings get stored inside the vault itself.

Likewise, we can configure high availability for the vault, like an active/passive or an active/active configuration. Replication disaster recovery is also supported.

CyberArk is also capable of rotating the credentials for a lot of endpoints. It has the CPM plugins by default for password management, Windows and Linux, as well as databases like Oracle and MS SQL, and can also rotate to some network devices like Cisco 9000.

We have Privileged Access Management, a general server between the user's and the target's machine. All of the sessions go from that server to the target endpoints. Once the end user disconnects the session, the session recordings and live monitoring will be uploaded to the vault. That recording will be stored for 180 days for auditing.

Another component is Privileged Threat Analytics. It detects any threats on target machines. For example, an end user might connect to a Linux endpoint and try to run privileged commands. Those commands are customizable and can be defined in the PTA as well. Whenever those users run those particular commands on the target, the PTA will report suspicious activity and report to security admins in the organization via mail or even on the web portal. We have a separate tab for security.

Within security events, these particular suspicious activities will be detected as threats and attain a risk score, "This is the user who connected to this particular target and ran these particular commands or applications."

CyberArk has a remote access solution called CyberArk Remote Access Alero. CyberArk also supports HTML gateways so that users can connect from outside the network without a VPN connection.

The solution has many advantages, such as the user interfaces and remote app features when using local applications when sessions are getting established over RDP, SSH, database, and web browsers. It is easy for administration as well.

Password management for all the endpoints needs improvement.

CyberArk can handle password management for Windows, Linux, databases, and network devices. However, there are solutions like Tenable or Skybox, Palo Alto, and other security devices for which we cannot provide password rotations on CyberArk. CyberArk should look into development for those particular plugins. I heard they had developed them, but they are not widely available. So if, for example, a customer requires CPM's password management plugin for Tenable, they need to send a request to CyberArk themselves so that the CyberArk team will then sell it to the customer. It does not come with an implementation license. It's a separate thing that a customer needs to purchase. CyberArk will assign it to that particular customer ID, and that plugin will not be supported for other customers. But those are their business tactics. They will not reveal all their plugins, only the basic ones.

I have worked with CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault for four years on a regular basis.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support is very poor. We handle implementation for our clients, so we do not handle support after. We do the knowledge transfer and if they face some challenges, we will show them how to troubleshoot as well as the documentation. We provide everything to the customer as they are not experts in CyberArk.

If the customer faces any issue, they will raise a case with CyberArk in the technical portal. But once they raise a case, CyberArk will not respond.

Let us say I opened a case this morning. Initially, they will respond, "I am the technical expert handling this particular case. Please provide me the logs." Their first reply will be that they want the logs. The customer will then gather the logs somehow and attach those logs to the case.

However, it will take two days for technical support to investigate their logs and reply. Even after two days, they will reply, and will say, "I am transferring this case to the higher level expert" that is, L2 or L3, "they will get back to you." 

The initial reply will be given by the L1 engineer who doesn't know the product or how to troubleshoot that situation, so every case will go to the L2 level or L3. The time taken in the process is too heavy. So even if I open the case as a "severe" case, even if it is not severe, they will reply to say that this particular case is not severe, so I have to keep it as "medium" or "low." As a result, customers consider hiring support from my company.

Neutral

With CyberArk, we have the direct installer file and setup files for each component, such as Password Vault Web Access, CPM, PSM, and PTA. The implementation engineer should install every component. We also need to have servers for each component. We need to request a set of servers per the architecture and the components count. Once we get those servers, Windows or Linux servers, we need to copy the setup files onto them. We need to deploy the setup files by installing and taking some steps. It contains manual and automatic installation, with CyberArk providing some PowerShell scripts themselves. With those scripts, we can do the installation automatically. 

By comparison, with BeyondTrust, whatever the module is, the virtual appliance is built by the BeyondTrust team itself with all the configurations. We just need to deploy it in our organization network and do the initial networking configuration, and later, we can directly do the integrations.

Also, CyberArk recommends we do hardening for each component for security purposes. After hardening, unwanted firewalls and services will be disabled on the operating systems, which makes the product more secure.

Though there are some efforts required from the implementation engineer, the installation is straightforward. I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten.

Users will clearly understand the solution once they go through the architecture diagram.

To connect to the target systems and view the accounts, view the session recordings, and check if the system health of all the components is working well. Any admin-related task will be done in the web portal, Password Vault Web Access, a separate component in CyberArk.

CyberArk is one of the better solutions which users will want to implement in their organization for securing their privileged accounts and access, and session monitoring for auditing. If they can deploy CyberArk, it's a good product.