Austin, Texas and Newton, Mass. and LONDON – June 22, 2009 – As companies struggle to meet compliance requirements and reduce the risk of privacy breaches and fraud, privileged accounts pose significant challenges because they convey broad and deep access privileges that cannot be traced to a specific person. Cyber-Ark Software, the leader in Privileged Identity Management solutions, and SailPoint, an award-winning provider of identity governance software, have partnered to mitigate those risks by enabling organizations to inventory and manage privileged accounts; to understand the business role and organizational membership of users requesting and using privileged accounts; and to monitor the actions users take with these accounts.
Privileged accounts, such as UNIX Root or Windows Administrator, proliferate through an organization’s infrastructure on every server, device, application, database, desktop and laptop. While necessary for the administration of these systems, these commonly unmanaged accounts pose unique and extremely dangerous challenges due to the unfettered access they provide to key, high-risk systems and data. Additionally, because they are anonymous and typically shared among administrators, developers and contractors, privileged accounts are a frequent source of audit deficiencies. To prevent insider fraud, data breaches and failed IT audits, organizations must be able to control and monitor shared accounts in the context of business, legal and regulatory policies.
Cyber-Ark and SailPoint are breaking new ground by providing a solution that bridges the gap between identity governance and privileged account management. By bringing together and integrating these governance and account management capabilities, the combined solution will better address critical security vulnerabilities like insider threats and will improve a company’s ability to meet audit and compliance requirements versus stand alone point solutions. SailPoint customers can now use IdentityIQ™ to monitor and manage privileged accounts across the enterprise, and demonstrate that proper controls are in place as required by IT audits. Further, by incorporating data on privileged accounts from Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite into SailPoint’s identity risk model, managers now have better insights into corporate risk exposure from user access controls.
“Addressing the risks associated with the sheer power of shared, privileged accounts remains a challenging issue for organizations. This partnership represents an important first step in linking privileged account information with the identity governance and compliance world,” said Udi Mokady, CEO of Cyber-Ark. “By integrating SailPoint’s identity governance capabilities with Cyber-Ark’s ability to secure, audit and manage a company’s privileged accounts, we are making it easier for customers to control their IT risks by proactively detecting inappropriate or unauthorized shared account access or activity, identifying the user involved and taking the appropriate policy remediation actions.”
SailPoint CEO and Founder Mark McClain agreed, observing that, “The news is peppered with disgruntled or dishonest employees hijacking a company’s network, planting malware bombs to disable the entire IT infrastructure or stealing sensitive customer data. Many of these security breaches can be pinpointed to a privileged account, but only after the damage is done. By partnering with an industry leader like Cyber-Ark, we’re able to provide customers with end-to-end visibility into privileged accounts within the context of all other access privileges,
