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We use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for all kinds of privileged accounts, comprising personal accounts, service accounts, and different database accounts. We manage the administrator account for Windows, the root account and reconcile accounts for Unix servers, and system administrator accounts in databases. Personal accounts are also managed along with some shared service accounts.

I work for a cybersecurity reseller company, which is US-based, and we provide managed services to all kinds of industries. Currently, I am working with a natural resource and a healthcare company.

Many things have improved with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. All privileged accounts are now secured. 

The password management keeps the passwords rotated, and these have different sets of policies, which keep the passwords in compliance. Compliance-wise, it is good to have a PAM solution in the organization. I believe CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is the best one available at this point in time.

The best thing about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is that they keep on upgrading it. They continually conduct research and development from their end, and we get immediate support from CyberArk whenever OEM support is required for any task. Support-wise, they are the best, and the way they conduct research and analysis and upgrade the tool often is excellent.

They keep on improving regularly. As of now, it does not manage all of the IDM practices. It is only good as a PAM solution. If they could work more on Privileged Threat Analytics, it would be beneficial. It has limitations, so improvements on PTA would be fine.

I first used CyberArk Privileged Access Manager in 2016, and since then, I have worked on different tools as Cloakware, CA PAM, but I am now again working on CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, so it has been approximately seven years.

If implemented properly, the stability for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is very good.

I would rate the scalability for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager as nine out of ten. It is very scalable, and you can manage more than 100,000 accounts, as I have worked in environments where we managed that volume and more.

We are partners with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Our clients are medium and small businesses. The number of accounts we manage in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is approximately 10,000 in one client and 5,000 in another.

Support-wise, they are the best. I would rate the technical support for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have used a very old tool called Cloakware before CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, created by CA Technologies. It later got upgraded to merge with CA Technologies, and we had a product called CA PAM, which later got improved into what we see in the market today, called BeyondTrust. Cloakware was not that organized. There were many issues with provider IDs, the interface was very old, and hardly any companies use it these days. When I was using it, I was working for a US-based bank. Comparing that with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is impossible, as they are poles apart.

We have had cloud and on-premises deployments. Its deployment is easy. They have provided all kinds of documents. They are available in the community portal. You can get all kinds of help from the community or people using CyberArk and the OEM.

The duration of the deployment for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager completely depends on the environment. If it is a big environment, it may take up to one or two months sometimes. It depends on the collaboration of the teams. If the infra teams, the network side, and the OS side do not collaborate properly with the CyberArk team, it can take longer. However, if everything is in place and the environment is not huge, it takes less than a month, around 20 days.

The solution requires regular maintenance. You need to keep upgrading when updates are released by CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, and they do it quite often. Server patching is very important, and you need to be aware of the services running all the time. They have provided a system health feature to check if there are any component services that stop. All maintenance is required regularly, not daily but perhaps weekly, depending on the size of the environment. A good thing is that all of these can be automated. It saves a lot of time there.

We have eight specialists in one team working with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager in my MSS team. There are other teams as well that have many CyberArk specialists, though I do not have an actual count.

It saves financially, though I cannot provide specific numbers. It is vital to have a PAM tool in your organization because it protects you from all kinds of malicious attacks, both insider and outside threats.

Regarding time-saving, many things are automated on CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, which helps us save considerable time work-wise and is very efficient for users. The end users have the authority to reconcile the password or verify it before using session isolation, which is one of the unique features that can be enabled through Privileged Session Manager, preventing any attacks from happening within the organization when connected with sessions through CyberArk Privileged Access Manager.

The pricing for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is quite expensive, and the pricing varies from region to region. In APAC, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager can be obtained for less than in North America, according to my understanding. Pricing-wise, they could improve by trying to sell their product in bulk licenses. You need to have a service provider or a reseller as the mediator company building the CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Pricing-wise, they could definitely do a little better.

I would recommend CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to other users for all the reasons discussed. It has been number one on Gartner's quadrant for several years. Considering all those factors and being the best tool in the market for Privileged Access Management, it is recommended.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.

My use cases as of right now include configuration, implementation, and developing a PowerShell report.

By implementing CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, we wanted to secure the password data and password accounts. We could see the benefits of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager immediately after we deployed it and started using it.

They could improve CyberArk Privileged Access Manager by providing more reports. If I need to know the 10 most-used accounts for this week, that functionality can be made available in the reports.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for seven years.

It is stable. The environment is stable, with no lagging, crashing, or downtime.

I cannot say much about scalability because we did not have any need for it.

I have contacted their technical support plenty of times. I would rate CyberArk's support a seven out of ten. They are always good.

Neutral

I have not used any alternatives to CyberArk Privileged Access Manager in my career.

The initial deployment was easy because I went to training first. The training was set up by CyberArk. From design to implementation, it took close to six months.

In terms of maintenance, it requires OS upgrades and patches. It doesn't take a long time.

We did not use any help from a third party, such as an integrator or consultant. The number of people required depends on the environment. I don't see how one person can manage it because there is a lot of information to collect before even doing a design.

My company always complains about the cost of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager because it's too high.

For a new user, I would advise them to try to configure CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a couple of times before starting to use it in a production environment.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.