CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews

The solution is used to provide privileged access management to our datacentre environments, for anyone with admin rights with infrastructure or applications within the datacentres. Authentication to the solution in the PVWA (Password Vault Web Access) with onward connectivity via the PSM for Windows (PSM) as well as the PSM for SSH (PSMP). These provide the session isolation, audit, and session recording capabilities that CyberArk offers. The use of Privileged Threat Analytics (PTA) adds more control functionality to the solution.

The product has allowed us to improve both the management and access to privileged credentials, while also creating a full audit trail of all activities happening within isolated sessions of all tasks and activities taking place within the solution. 

This includes sessions via the solution and sessions to administer the solution itself. From a user perspective, we no longer need to try and create or remember complex passwords or have to be concerned about when they will change as the solution takes care of this and can and does populate these credentials for you so mistyping a complex password is a thing of the past.

Password management is a great feature, as all passwords are changed more frequently. This can be scheduled in line with a specific policy requirement or each time the credentials are returned to the pool for reuse and are always compliant with the password policy however long or complicated the policy states that they need to be. 

Another great feature is the Privileged Threat Analytics (PTA) as this can stop a session based on prescribed risk and bring it to an end or pause it pending approval to proceed.  

The admin interface of the Password Vault Web Access (PVWA) is moving from an old style (the classic interface) to a new style (the v10 interface) and unfortunately, this process is quite slow. That said, it has been moving in the right direction with features becoming available in the v10 interface and some user features are available in both classic and v10 interfaces. I would love to see all the classic interface features moved into the v10 interface or available in both interfaces within the next version. 

I've used the solution for about six years.

The solution has been very stable.

The solution performs well, however, based on the user base may require a sizable footprint.

Support does vary depending on how critical your issue is and if it needs to be elevated to dev support.

Positive

Our previous solution was not a PAM solution and these days you can't afford to not use one.

The setup is not complicated when trained staff are used.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

Set-up costs can be minimized by controlling the number of applications that are made available within the solution. The newer licenses are per user and open up access to a suite of products, the best value, and security can be achieved by using more of the products.

We looked at other products like Delinia and Wallix.

Take advantage of the vendor's training or use a good partner to provide support and administration.

The most valuable features of CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault are password rotations and password encryptions.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault has a lot of enterprise-level features compared to other PAM products. It's a well-known product, and its implementation is very easy. The solution has good documentation compared to other products. CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is legitimate software that releases patches as per vulnerability.

We require IAM (identify and access management) capability at the administrator level because we need more identification.

I have been working with CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault for the past six months.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is a stable solution.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is a scalable solution. We have more than 1000 people using the solution.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's technical support team is good. Whenever we require any help, they assist us based on the SLA. The technical support team's response speed and competence are very good.

Positive

The solution was easy to deploy.

We need a basic understanding of the tools needed and customer requirements to deploy the solution. If the customer is looking only for a password deployment, we deploy only the password.

The deployment will require two or three people and a minimum of one week.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's pricing is reasonable. Since CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is an enterprise-level solution, its cost is higher than other solutions in the market. The solution comes with maintenance for the first year. However, after that, we need to pay for maintenance.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's licensing model is comparatively very easy. It has a single license. We can deploy the solution based on the particular solutions we need.

One or two administrators are more than enough to operate the solution.

A backup strategy and DR setup are more than enough to implement CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault.

Overall, I rate CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault an eight out of ten.

We are mostly rotating passwords and using PSM for remote connections.

It provides us with better security and control over our accounts.

It provides an automated and unified approach for securing access for all types of identities. This approach is important for us. The more things we have that can be automated, the easier it is to get things done.

It gives a single pane of glass to manage and secure human and machine identities across environments, which is important for us.

It saves time when it comes to onboarding new employees and providing them secure access to SaaS apps and IT systems. It probably saves a couple of hours.

The automatic rotation of credentials is probably the most useful feature.

It should be easy to use for non-technical people. Its interface can be a bit difficult. Some parts of its interface are not very intuitive. Some of the controls are hidden, and instead of having a screen with all the controls for that account on it, you have to use menus and other similar things.

Its documentation could be better. Some of the documentation lacks details for people who aren't super technical.

I have been using this solution for about six years.

It is stable. We never had any hiccups that were caused by CyberArk.

It is easily scalable. In terms of usage, it is being used by all of IT. We have over 500 users utilizing the solution. We're always adding new people and features, so its usage is increasing every day. We plan to implement more types of accounts. 

Their technical support is good, but some of their documentation lacks details for people who aren't super technical. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Other than the regular Password Manager, they didn't have any real solution. They chose to look into CyberArk because it is a good security practice to have accounts automatically rotate and secure remote connections.

It is pretty complex, but they have professional services to help with that. It is complex because of all the security around it, all the hardening, and getting everything set up to communicate with each other. I am not sure about the duration of the initial deployment because I wasn't on the team then.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require a lot of people. Maintenance is just keeping up with patches. It is pretty stable and doesn't require a lot.

We used CyberArk's professional services. They were good, and they helped get everything set up. They also helped do upgrades.

It is in line with its competitors, but all such solutions cost too much money.

It is a good choice. I'm not sure if they're the market leader or not, but they seem to have the biggest footprint. I know there are a couple of competitors, but I've never used them. The other two that I know about are not as widely used, so there is a bigger community for support for CyberArk, and there is also CyberArk's support.

CyberArk is good as a technology partner for ensuring that we maintain a strong security posture throughout our digital transformation. It is a needed platform to have.

Given my experience with CyberArk PAM, to a colleague at another company who says, “We want to solve cloud security challenges with born-in-the-cloud security solutions as opposed to legacy solutions that have been adapted to the cloud," I would say that CyberArk is a good option for the cloud. That's because you don't have to worry about maintenance, and all the integrations are already in place. The different accounts that CyberArk can integrate with are already in place.

It doesn't really give a single pane of glass to manage and secure identities across multiple environments. It only gives visibility into CyberArk and how the accounts are working there. If something is wrong with an account, sometimes, you have to check other tools, such as Active Directory, or permissions.

We don't use CyberArk’s Cloud Entitlements Manager and Secrets Manager. We use CyberArk PAM to implement least privilege entitlements, and it is neither easy nor difficult to implement them. It is somewhere in the middle. The adoption of least privilege entitlements by using CyberArk PAM is also somewhere in the middle. If users aren't really technical, they would have problems with it.

It provides consistent controls to enable secure access, manage secrets, and implement least privilege at scale across our environment. It is somewhat user-friendly for people to just rotate passwords. Its interface can be a bit difficult.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

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."

I am a CyberArk admin. I manage everyone's PSA accounts, including EPM and PVWA.

It has been performing very nicely. We are on version 9.10. We are thinking of upgrading to 10.3 soon, hopefully. I don't want go to 10.4 since it just came out.

We are planning on utilizing CyberArk to secure application credentials and endpoints because of PAS. We do have a lot of accounts for developers, and we do manage a lot of passwords in the world.

Our company is not in the cloud yet. We are not that big. We are looking to move to it soon, as it is on our roadmap. By the end of the year or early next year, we are hoping to move CyberArk to the cloud.

It has removed the local admin rights. It is safe and improving well. 

Also, everyone doesn't have passwords to certain applications because of PAS, which is managing the passwords world-wide. So, it is more secure.

Our overall security posture is pretty good, but there is always more to improve upon.

I feel like I love EPM more because it is a pretty sleek tool. I like how it manages everyone's accounts. It removes all the local admin accounts, and I like that part about EPM.

You can write different types of policies for custom business needs or any developer needs. If they need certain functions allocated, they can be customized easily.

The interface on version 9 looks old. I am excited for version 10 because of the interface and design are good, and it is easier to use.

It is pretty stable because we have not moved to the new version. When it comes out, we don't want to go to the newest version the right away because we do not know if it is stable or not. We do not want to put it in the production yet, so we want to wait until the next one comes out, then we go from there.

We have not had any downtime with the product. No issues yet.

It is pretty scalable. It should meet our needs in the future.

They are extremely knowledgeable. Sometimes I asked a question, and their first reply is the answer. Then, I have them close the ticket. I feel like I am getting the right person.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

If you want more security, get CyberArk.

I used the new plugin generator utility here in the lab. Right now, it is manual, and the plugin is very easy to use. It is amazing.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I prefer better tech support, because I love the CyberArk support. I want support like that everywhere with all my vendors.

It is used to manage the policies on our endpoint because we want to takeaway admin rights to protect our computers.

We have had our implementation issues. However, the software is light years ahead of its competitors. We have seen massive progress with the updates of the software. We have been doing pretty well with it in the time that we have been implementing it.

We are trying to manage the endpoints, but our company has been a long-time customer. We want to integrate the other products because EPM is not the only one. We do have PAS and AIM, but now it looks like CyberArk is moving towards integrating all of them into one thing, so they can all work together in one console. We would like to get there eventually. I can't wait to upgrade.

We are stripping administrative rights, and we have implemented a special ID to help folks that lose administrative rights. Maybe it broke something, so while we design policies and try to get them where they need to be, they will have this ID in the meantime. CyberArk is able to protect both of these things while we move forward in this.

The software is insanely robust. You can do whatever you want. If you want to put your own logo on the pop-up, then you can do it. You want to change the color to pink, yellow or brown, then you can do it. You can do whatever you want with this thing. This leads to people getting lost on what they want to do, but for those who have a great plan with a clear, concise idea of where their organization is going and what they want to accomplish, it is there to help you.

Where a lot of people might struggle is with the actual environment, and where to begin. The software builds on top of that. You have to have a solid foundation. You will learn that as you work through the product, but you will also see how great and powerful the product is.

With computer security, administrative rights is probably the number one thing that comes to mind. This is a software that will allow people to still use their Google Chrome, Adobe, and Facebook. They can do what they need to do, but it still keeps them protected. That is what is so great about the product, we can sell it to people as, "We are not trying to stop you. We want to enable you, but we want to be safe too. It's there to do that." 

• I love the interface because it is colorful, easy to read, easy to see, and how easy it is to make policies. 
• I love how we can make a policy that affects everybody instantly, which is great. 
• I love the reporting features, so it is easy to see what we did.

I love the product overall, because it is great.

I want some of the things which are glitching out there for me to be fixed. I have heard that there is something in the works, that they will be putting a feature in the help desk where they will have a message board now. So, I could communicate with other people who are having the same problems and pull their issues, this way I don't have to bother support all the time. Also, people can vote. They can vote on the most important issues, and CyberArk will prioritize them next, really listening to the customer. That is pretty cool.

One of our current issues is a publishing issue. If we whitelist Google Chrome, all the events of Google Chrome should be gone. It is not happening. However, they are coming close to a solution. It has been an issue for a while. I heard that this is one of the top priorities that they're working on.

This is where we have had some woes with this software. Part of it is in our environment, and what we built it in as far as our database server. We met the requirements and it had some issues. The software is still growing and getting better. It is not 100 percent there yet, but even so, there is nothing in comparison to the product. It is too robust. It offers too many features that nothing else does. You might as well deal with it. You are going to deal with implementation and memory issues regardless that we had on the SQL Server, etc.

Part of this will come from your personal environment, but CyberArk has done a great job with it. However, they still have a ways to go. One thing I really like with every upgrade, they listen to the people. If you are saying this needs to be fixed, they listen. They usually put it in the upgrade, so that is cool.

There are growing pains from integrating a software which allows you to do anything, and you could do anything but it is based on your environment. The software can do whatever it wants, but it is going to be reactive to your environment. Everyone will have a different experience. 

If this was a perfect world, you had a clean active directory environment, your SCCM solution was fantastic, and there were no firewall issues, the product would deploy. No problem. Read everything, and you are good to go.

I could definitely understand. It is like designing the program for how it should work, then dealing with real life scenarios. You talk to any company here, and everyone's active directory is a mess. That is where you are trying to get your data from. That is where you struggle sometimes. However, the software is great. The Dev guys are on it as far as upgrades, etc.

If they keep upgrading the software, they are going to be around for a long-time. We are a long-time customer. We have multiple products, and they are going towards the right direction because if we own three or four of their products, then we can meld them all into one and they all work together, which is great.

In the beginning (early 2017), we had some issues. We would have a discrepancy in what user support was telling us. From mid-last year until now, it has been absolutely spectacular. They have key people who are very good, and I speak extremely highly of them. They are excellent, very professional with a lot of knowledge.

We did not have a previous solution, because we have always had admin rights. In fact, we did a proof of concept in CyberArk, version 1.

We needed something to manage the endpoint and to be able to empower the user. By far from not only a user's perspective on what they would be able to accomplish, but from the person who has to design the policies, it was the best. It was like working in MS-DOS compared to Windows 10. 

We had an educational and technical guide for the entire setup process. I also had CyberArk with me on the phone.

I designed the solution. Because they knew that this is a solution that no one had really seen before, they made sure they had somebody onsite throughout the entire implementation.

We have accomplished our security goals. We have two-factor authenticated and vaulted our important accounts, so people can't just steal stuff from us. That is pretty important. We are protecting ourselves the right way.

Avecto was the competitor. They integrated with McAfee ePO, which was our endpoint solution at the time. Unfortunately, it was not as robust as I thought it would be. I didn't like it. I felt like the product relied too much on McAfee to do what it needed to do. Whereas, CyberArk was a standalone client which was way more robust.

The competition was utilizing a product that we are getting rid of in two weeks.

Get on implementing it today. Be patient. Test a lot. Deploy slowly.

It has places to go. I see the potential. It is getting there, but it has room to grow. If you compare this product with anything else as far as an endpoint solution, there is nothing which even compares.

We have implemented the new plugin generator utility already. I trained the help desk. It is really easy. Instead of having to fix it myself, the service desk will receive a one-time code to help the customer immediately, so they do not have to wait. I will receive a ticket to make a long-term policy. It is a perfect system.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: communication.

Our primary case is for AIM. We are a huge AIM customer, and we also do the shared account management.

We are looking into utilizing CyberArk's secure infrastructure and running application in the cloud for future usage.

CyberArk has allowed us to get the credentials and passwords out of hard-coded property files. This is why we went with AIM in the beginning. Then, on the EBB user side, we were able to secure all the server root passwords and admin for Windows. This was a big win for us.

It helps us with our SOX's controls and meeting new client directives.

• AIM
• CPM

I would like to see is the policy export and import. When we expend, we do not want to just hand do a policy. Even with exporting and importing, this will help.

So far, so good. We have not had any downtime. We do not want to jinx it.

We think it is good. That is why we moved to it.

We open the cases. We have made phone calls. We have engaged the professional services and the consulting services to help us move on.

They are mostly up to par. Sometimes, they are a hindrance, when you know you have been through the issue again, and they want to gather the same log files, start from the basics, and we already know we are past that. 

Sometimes, we just need a Level 2 person instead of starting with a Level 1 person, or we need a higher level of support on an issue right away.

We are a long-time customers, so we know what we are doing. The turnover might be an issue, because the support people are not local, or something. Therefore, it takes overnight to receive an answer back. We are hoping we can get local support. Though, recently it is getting better.

We did have one serious case, where our support person and everybody needed a vacation, then took a vacation day, but our leadership needed us to stay on top of the case. It was a day or two where we didn't get any feedback. It would have been nice to know that they were going to be off. They had to hurry and quickly to get somebody assigned to the case. That was probably our only experience there.

Our solution architects, and some of the people on that side, did the PoC and the initially implementation. Then, they handed it off to us.

There is a lot of return of our investment related to SOX compliance.

I would recommend the product. 

We have done a lot of customer referrals for CyberArk. It is good. It fits our needs, and there is not anything else out in the market that can match it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Good support.
  
• Meeting the each of the requirements.
• Usability of the product.
• Ease of implementation.
• Not a lot of customization; you can get it right out-of-the-box and run with it.

I'm a security solutions architect. I design solutions and hand them over to the client once they're implemented. We educate the users on how the solution works or turn it over to our managed services department

CyberArk PAM is an identity management solution used to manage privileged accounts on domains and local servers, including admin accounts in Windows environments and root users in Unix. 

With CyberArk, you can be fully confident that your existing accounts are secure. You will be 100 percent secure against attacks if you have all the right policies in place.

PAM could be more user-friendly and CyberArk could update the documentation to include more real-world examples. You have to learn it yourself through trial and error. In particular, the online documentation should have more information about troubleshooting.

I have used CyberArk PAM for two years. 

CyberArk PAM is stable.

CyberArk PAM is scalable. Managing 80,000 accounts is almost as easy as managing a thousand. 

CyberArk has a solid community. It's easy to get support and feedback from the forums. However, it can be difficult to access official technical support if you don't have a CyberArk certification because they have a process to limit unnecessary calls. You get excellent support once you're certified. 

Deploying CyberARK is complicated, but it is relatively easy for me because I have excellent scripts for implementing the prerequisites. It might be challenging for the average end user. It would be ideal to educate them in a demo environment because hard to explain this to a user without them. I would need to build an environment to show them. A simulated lab environment is one thing CyberArk PAM lacks.

We set up the prerequisites and discover the privileged accounts in the environment. CyberArk has a tool that scans the servers and detects accounts. This works best in a Microsoft environment. It's more difficult without Active Directory because you have to rely on the information the customer provides. You can begin the onboarding process once you've identified the accounts. 

It takes a month to set up the prerequisites and two or three days to install CyberArk PAM. Once it is deployed, it takes eight months to a year to tie up some loose ends. You may need to identify some accounts that you missed. The total time depends on the size and complexity of the user's environment. If you've configured everything correctly, it's simple to maintain. 

The ROI for CyberArk PAM is difficult to measure because the benefit is a reduction in risk. If CyberArk can eliminate most of the customer's security risks, then it's worth what they paid. 

CyberArk isn't cheap, but it's the best. You have to pay for quality. 

I rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager 10 out of 10. CyberArk is the leader in Gartner's quadrant. I tell my customers that they need to be 100 percent secure—99 percent isn't good enough. The top hackers will exploit that 1 percent hole, and you're finished. You need 100 percent, or else you're wasting your money.