ARCON Privileged Access Management Reviews

I'll provide feedback on additional features after the project is completed. I think it would be better to comment on that after the implementation is finished.

I have been testing this solution for the past month. 

The deployment is not finished yet. To assess performance and stability, the project needs completion. Currently, our professional service is actively involved, managing tasks related to services and users in the ongoing termination process.

Currently, I'm in constant communication with them. They are professional, helpful, and highly experienced.

Positive

They need to simplify the implementation process. I've observed that sometimes the professional service is focused on the database, especially around log shipping, and it can be challenging.

I'm actively involved in the deployment process, but it's carried out by our professional service. Our plans are implemented through this service, acting as intermediaries between our clients and the professionals. The implementation typically takes around a month, but various issues, such as management, resources, and other challenges, may arise during the deployment.

One notable difficulty we face is the lack of exceptional resources for deploying the solution in our plans. Despite encountering challenges, our satisfaction with the professional service remains high. They are dedicated to implementing the solution effectively.

I'm uncertain about the licensing, specifically the pricing. This falls under the purview of other teams, particularly the sales teams. I am not informed about the pricing details.

I would rate it a ten out of ten overall. It's scalable and easy to deploy. However, I have some concerns. I noticed there are no instructional videos or guides on the network portal for initial configurations. There is limited information available, and this is a concern for me. I would like to see more resources and guides to address these issues.

Regrettably, this product remains incomplete, and the interim phase is still pending. It is challenging to determine its effectiveness due to some significant initial license issues.

Compared to BeyondTrust, ARCON Privileged Access Management fails to provide its users with functionalities like managing AD Bridging and addressing the OT assets from an OT standpoint, including operational technology devices. The solution lacks to offer a governance mechanism for operational technology assets. ARCON has not addressed all of these areas where they lack, while BeyondTrust has a solution for the unaddressed issues by ARCON.

I have experience with ARCON products for ten years. With ARCON Privileged Access Management, I have experience of around nine months. Since I work in the pre-sales department and am not a developer, I won't be able to give you a complete or detailed insight into the solution's technical aspects. My company only recommends ARCON Privileged Access Management to potential users. We already have customers using the solution. My company has a partnership with ARCON.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven or eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support team was good.

The deployment process for the solution was easy.

ARCON Privileged Access Management's pricing is reasonable.

Some of our customers who use the solution are satisfied while some are not. We have also received some negative feedback from some of our customers. So, I recommend BeyondTrust over ACRON Privileged Access Management owing to its additional features and easier deployment process. BeyondTrust is also available on a hybrid cloud. However, if you compare the costs of both solutions, BeyondTrust is on the higher side. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We prefer not to talk about our use cases for security reasons.

Overall, aside from the lack of password management, this solution is the best. It's a very good product.

The solution needs more work on the password management side of things. Password management is a big challenge for us, and I would like to improve this aspect. We're finding that BeyondTrust is better in this regard, which is why we're probably going to migrate over. It will offer better security I think.

I've been working with the solution for the past two and a half years.

The stability is really good on this solution. This product is really amazing. But in terms of our security, password management is a little bit of a worry for us. Security-wise, we need to change the password frequently. This product only has options for changing the password once a week, every two weeks, two days, or three days. Our recommendation is whenever users want to access the target server, they have to, every time, change the password. So this option is not available currently and it's a weak point.

The solution is scalable, but the security level doesn't increase. That might be an issue for larger companies and continues to be an issue for us. Still, we consider it to be a very good product.

We use this product quite extensively and on a daily basis.

We've made contact with the technical support team on multiple occasions. We even reached out about increasing the password security protocols as an added feature and they said they would consider it, however not much has changed there. They said they were going to release it as a new feature in the next release. That never happened. It's the reason we're looking at another product. It would have been great if they actually responded to their client's needs a bit more.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all.

We handle every aspect of the solution, from deployment and troubleshooting all the way through to managing and accounting. I personally have an administrator-level certification so I know personally how to handle the implementation of the solution and how to work everything in the background.

Deployment takes a maximum of two hours. It's not a long process.

We were able to implement the solution in-house using our own team. we didn't require the assistance of any integrators, resellers or consultants.

We're customers; we don't have any relationship with the business. We're not a reseller or anything like that. We just use the product.

Currently, we're using the solution. However, it's our intention to migrate to BeyondTrust in the near future.

Currently, we are using the latest version of the solution.

I'd like new users to know that the deployment really is quite straightforward, and it's easy to manage and troubleshoot. It's simple to restore the database within minutes if necessary as well. There are some great features that are available on the solution that makes it a worthwhile addition to a business. For us, security remains a concern, and password management is lacking. If an organization shares those concerns, this may not be the perfect solution for them.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

• Multi-user, multi-OS, multi-database, and multi-hardware platforms
• Cisco, Huawei, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.
• Lots of networking equipment including F5 Networks.

• It helps in managing privileged access management as well as password management.
• Auto-discovery
• Access control.

• Auto-discovery
• Access control
• Privilege management
• Security controls
• Identity discovery
• Usage of privileged accounts
• Time of sessions and monitoring of sessions.

• Security
• Access management
• Illegal activity finding.

Good.

Good.

Good.

No.

Good.

Yes.

It's not yet calculated.

No.

No.

No.

We're using it for managing the access to our devices; privileged administrative access to the devices is handled through ARCON.

Previously, we had to go through some effort to change the credentials of our devices. The process was subject to human error. For example, if someone missed the schedule, the password would not be changed. For things like managing credentials, some kind of register had to be maintained.

With the Password Vault of ARCON, all these processes are automated. The credentials are changed, as per the schedule. The information is encrypted, kept in our vault, and sent to all the email addresses within the ARCON solution itself.

It has helped us in automating all the work we do. For instance, it helps us in forensic analysis. It helps us find out who has done what; what was done by the user. Also, managing the accounts on the devices has become easier.

The most valuable features are the password management and the logs that are captured. We use both extensively.

Currently, we can manage only the SSH or RDP connections, but there are many more devices that are present, apart from our SSH and RDP. We want all this to be part of the ARCON solution. For the password management, they should increase the pool of supported devices, they should have more connectors.

They have to work on their tech support. 

In addition, they have to consider that upgrades should be easy for the administrators. Currently, along with the upgrade of the ARCON solution, we have to consider the desktops and the endpoints from where the solution will have to be accessed. We have to upgrade those endpoints and desktops as well. So upgrades are not smooth.

They also have to work on a cloud solution, because most things are going towards the cloud. A cloud integration should be considered in ARCON. We have not seen one up until now.

We have not encountered any major problems with the product. We are able to use it without any problem.

We haven't had any scalability issues.

They need to improve on technical support, because ARCON has become a critical application. They should provide 24-hour support. But we've observed, in many scenarios, we don't get the support we need until the managers are involved. So they have to improve on the tech support.

We started with ARCON because a few of our projects were using it and, when we were thinking in the direction of adopting a PAM solution, we got recommendations from the projects that we should consider it.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had a team that helped us in deploying the solution. While deploying the solution, they planned the architecture and the information they would be needing. They provided that to us beforehand and, post-deployment, they arranged training for the team on two occasions.

The product's pricing is a good value. It's appropriately priced. The product has all the required features. It doesn't work in some of the areas but, overall, it's pretty good.

We considered CyberArk and CA PAM.

My advice would depend on how your administrators are placed, because it depends a lot on the desktop that they're using. It has dependencies on the .NET framework the ActiveX version. So, if you have a uniform environment, and it's very easy to upgrade the endpoints, then ARCON could be considered. Because, for any upgrade of the ARCON solution, an upgrade of the endpoints is required, for the desktops. It's from there that the administrator will be accessing the ARCON solution. It is a little complex. But if you have a uniform environment, you should consider ARCON.

It has all the capabilities and the customization is easy, but there are the problems with tech support and upgrading the solution which has a lot of dependencies. Because of those dependencies, we cannot consider deploying the upgrade quickly.

It has positive and negative points.

Primary use is to control Microsoft administrators.

It has improved our government compliance score in terms of audits. Auditors used to ask this basic question: Who has done what? We never had an answer because everyone was logging in using a common ID.

The second improvement is the discipline that has developed in the administrators. They definitely want to do things in the right manner and nobody wants to do anything wrong because the recording is going on and everybody knows that they are being watched.

One important feature is the administrator access, mainly for Windows machines as well as Linux machines. It is important for us because there is accountability associated with each user ID.

And the recordings are also helpful.

There are a few improvements that could be made. One is that it should be browser-agnostic and, frankly, it is working well on Internet Explorer. It should work on popular browsers like Mozilla and Firefox.

Also, I would like to see a "wild card" kind of a feature or something that would enable us to search the video.

Finally, it would be helpful to have a "Favorites" list. For example, if I have 100 servers but I only go to 10 servers frequently, a Favorites list would allow me to go through those 10 servers only.

The product is very stable. We have not faced any issues in terms of stability.

The scalability depends on the internal hardware. The software can handle a number of users and a number of servers. We started with about 100 servers. Now, we are around 900 servers. We have not found any issue in terms of scalability.

We can call them, submit a ticket, they can remote in. I haven't seen any issue with the technical support.

This was the first solution we started using.

The setup is quite simple. The only thing that is complex about the implementation is in terms of culture. Regarding the software setup, there's no problem. It's purely a standard software installation. Nothing outstanding about it.

In terms of quantity, I have not measured the ROI. But in terms of quality, I would put it more in terms of the man-hours my people wasted in complying with whatever requirements there were. With this solution, we have been able to do away with all those man-hours and do things in a very straightforward way. We look at ROI more in terms of the usability and how it makes our life simpler.

I definitely feel the product's pricing is a good value. It is one of the best products we have.

The licensing is server-based.

We had choices other than Arcon and we shortlisted a few products. We had selected a Dell solution, Arcon, and one other product. Then we went to a tendering process to learn about pricing. Ultimately whoever would quote the best price would get the order.

I would advise, during the implementation itself, in the beginning, to start with the 20 servers only. Then test it thoroughly, not as a product but, rather, the implementation methodology. What happened with us, during implementation, was that some users caused some problems. Actually, they weren't problems, rather they were more a user culture change, and how integration would happen with the SIM.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. It's a good product to have but it's not a 10 because most of the features don't get implemented. It would be helpful if they could arrange it so that the customer can implement features. They should conduct meetings and tell the users, as a group, about the features that should be implemented. Also, the customer's information should be available immediately to the support team so that support can be deployed immediately.

We use it to access all the servers.

From the administrative point of view, there are cases that I have automated. I used to have to log in to all the servers. Now, it's really simple to work.

For compliance, each change I do, in each of the servers, is clearly recorded. We recently faced an audit and this was an awesome feature. Even our auditor had praise for it saying, "This is really a good feature."

In terms of automation, there are a number of cases, ARCON-related, where we are automating. It could be user-creation or services-creation inside ARCON. There are wonderful features which have really helped me a lot to automate things.

Also, a helpful feature from the compliance perspective is the reporting. Suppose there is one server and I want to know what are all the types of access to it. Suppose there are some 10 users who are using that server. I can easily fetch a report showing, for example, that there are two users who have server admin access; there are three users who have read-only access; there are five users who have prompt-access.

The connectivity of the user interface is really awesome. It is segregated properly. I don't know exactly how ARCON looks out of the box but ours has a little bit of customization. The user interface, overall, is really good. If I have some 20 servers in my ID, I can easily see for which servers I have read-only access, for which servers I have prompt-access, and for which servers I have server admin access. 

There are no APIs readily available. There are hundreds of products available on the market. It could be many applications, not just the server gateway. For many applications, by default, we will get the API. Let's say I'm trying to integrate "XYZ" application with another application. When we do that, usually, we look for APIs. But ARCON does not have the APIs readily available. Having that, for a complete end-to-end solution, would really help. 

As I mentioned, I'm working on automation for ARCON so that whatever the ARCON administrator is doing will be automated, rather than having to do it manually. For that, I had to spend months to get the API developed myself. Having that handy out of the box, that would really help, because what I am doing is not limited or restricted to the three or four cases. I'm going to automate the complete end-to-end solution of ARCON administration in our organization. So having an API would really help me.

Performance-wise, we recently upgraded. Since that upgrade, the performance has been really good. Now, I truly don't see any issues. So far so good.

There were some small glitches earlier but they have been sorted out now. There was a little bit of slowness where, when I was trying to log in to a server it used to keep saying, "loading, loading," but that has been resolved. There was another issue where I would log in to a server, but the moment I logged in, I would get disconnected. That has also been resolved. There was one more issue where, when I tried to log in to a server and key in the credentials, the credentials were not entered into ARCON. And then, due to the multiple attempts, the ID would become blocked. But that has also been sorted.

The product team, the support team is readily available, 24/7. We have direct contact. If there are any issues, I get direct support. I don't see any issue there. Overall, the tech support is very good. They are very supportive, and we are getting immediate support.

I don't recall the name of the product, but we switched because of a lot of performance issues. With that product, we used to get a lot of customer complaints as well as user complaints saying that they would be in the middle of some production activity and the performance would be very slow, causing the production activity to be delayed.

I cannot comment on the initial setup because it was done by our system admin team along with support from the ARCON team. 

We recently upgraded. There were no issues during that implementation. Our own support team was readily available, on-site, to implement it.

Although I'm not involved with this side of it, I assume pricing would have been reasonable, that is why we went for it. I would say definitely say it gives value for the money.

It has really helped us a lot. It's a wonderful platform.

The primary use of the solution is to give privileged access to critical resources, including monitoring and auditability.

Whatever my scope was, it was covered by the application.

I recently was having an issue with the Office 365 web browser. Therefore, I reported this problem to the ARCON team, and they brought in developers. They made it compatible with the new browser station of Office 365. 

The locks, which can be features. You can group various departments to obtain the approval records for workflows. Therefore, it creates a type of automation, and I do not have to manually do everything or configure things.

Video and audio logs are there for any activities that the privileged admin carries out.

For the in-house built applications, they need to provide good, solid access through their portal.

It has been very stable. I have not had an issue with this product.

It is a scalable product.

A year ago, our infrastructure was on-premise. Then, we moved to the cloud infrastructure. Even during that time, it was very easy for us to move this application and database from on-premise to cloud, as well as configure new things, such as load balancing. The product is very compatible.

When we transitioned from our on-premise to the cloud environment, and even during the transition period, we did not face any challenges or any problems with this product. There was just minor tweaking that we had to do with the new features on the cloud, like failover, as well as autoscaling.

Tech support is quite good. They have been right there to help me out. 

Their support details are good. 

We did not use a previous access management tool. This product seems to appropriately meet our scope financially, as well as technically, which is why we went for it.

Implementation was very straightforward. 

Implementation may take about half a day, then you have to create your environment. However, this depends upon how many resources that you need to configure through it. If you want to give access and resources to people, then you should have a clear plan for your implementation. For example, which groups should you give access to. These things take about half a day to implement. Then, configuration is about a day. 

Product pricing is based on users and connections. We did not have to pay more for additional features.

They do have some licenses, which are required for things like Linux servers. However, in my environment, we do not have Linux servers. 

We also evaluated Densify.

I am satisfied with the application. The scope and specs that we had are met by this product. It is a very good product which is scalable.