Most organizations treat maintaining compliance as a necessary effort and cost of doing business — a box to check, an audit to survive, a regulatory hurdle to clear. Compliance rarely inspires excitement. For many organizations it is treated as a necessary obligation, something to satisfy regulators and auditors so the business can move forward. Security and IT teams often experience compliance as a cycle of documentation, manual processes and audit preparation that consumes valuable time and resources.
But the most effective security leaders see compliance very differently. Instead of viewing it as a regulatory burden, they will bundle it into risk reduction measures that streamline their workflows and amp up their security posture. A core element to this security posture is privileged access management (PAM). When modern PAM is done right, it yields efficiencies and dramatic time savings that are quantifiable with proven return-on-investment (ROI) numbers. These security leaders are the ones who learn to shine with modern PAM tools by their side.
Compliance: Be continuously compliant, but don't stop there.
It’s no simple thing to be compliant with multiple frameworks at a time, especially since these standards evolve and become more specific as time goes on. So what controls can PAM really put in place that help accelerate and boost the value of checking the compliance box?
Any one organization can be subject to comply with a host of regulatory standards such as NIS2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, DORA and more. Should a company fail audits that any of these standards enforce, there can be dire consequences. But doing the general “box-checking” doesn’t do enough to keep companies from audit failure. Organizations will need solutions that empower them to:
- Gain full visibility into user actions
- Automate risk remediation
- Enable ongoing proof of identity security control
By driving risk reduction through visibility and automation, compliance satisfaction techniques can expose areas to improve to create operational excellence.
Risk reduction
Risk reduction may not sound like an exciting topic, but it is the foundation of modern cybersecurity. Many of the most damaging breaches begin with compromised credentials or unmanaged privileged accounts. When privileged access is tightly controlled, the potential blast radius of an attack becomes significantly smaller.
The real solution is embedding security controls directly into the way access is managed across the organization. Modern PAM strategies do exactly this by automatically enforcing practices such as least privilege, monitoring privileged activity and analyzing behavior across both human and non-human identities. These controls reduce the likelihood that attackers can exploit excessive permissions, orphaned accounts or lateral movement within a network.
Reduced risk boost business value through trust. The goal is to identify the risk profile of any given identity and to note that identities over a certain threshold are privileged users. When the risk profile is reduced, the risk profile lowers with it.
And with compliance satisfied, risk can be automatically, drastically reduced.
Operational excellence
Every organization strives for operational excellence. This is where real business value lies, and compliance satisfaction is one of the best ways to achieve it.
The goal is not simply to pass audits or avoid regulatory penalties. The real opportunity lies in using compliance driven controls to improve how the organization operates.
Modern PAM solutions help organizations automate identity security practices while simplifying the process of demonstrating compliance. By reducing manual processes and providing deeper visibility into privileged activity, organizations can strengthen both security and operational performance.
Modern PAM in your compliance strategy
Every organization has multiple compliance frameworks to which they’ll need to adhere, and all of them require privileged access management (PAM).
This positions PAM as the ultimate security measure. With it, businesses can ensure risk reduction, which will satisfy compliance, which leads to the operational excellence that every trusted organization strives for.
Modern PAM solutions touch everything that is required for reporting. issue early warnings, report and monitor with applied, ongoing mitigation measures, and inform on the impact of the incident across the enterprise. How?
- Separation of duties: Individual permissions are managed via roles, strengthening access control.
- Least privilege: Users are only given privileges needed to do their job.
- User provisioning: New users are set up with the correct privileged and profiles are standardized for each user.
Operational excellence with One Identity PAM tools
Reducing the cost of becoming compliant is not enough. Look at how the controls – that you’re required to put in anyway – can be used to improve what you’re already doing.
And how can those controls be most efficiently put in place? With modern, automated PAM that streamlines compliance, leading to operational excellence.
One unnamed company using modern PAM solutions from One Identity, such as One Identity Safeguard and PAM Essentials, reported a 99.18% risk reduction and $7.2 million saved in a year from being intelligently compliant.
You have to be compliant anyway – you might as well do it profitably.
Learn More
WATCH VIDEO on Compliance-ready PAM as a strategic business accelerator and learn more on NIS2, SOX, HIPAA and specific compliance regulations you may be facing.
READ the whitepaper to learn more on How modern PAM eliminates identity risk and operational friction
