Idira Privileged Access Manager Reviews

Primarily, I import accounts from our critical systems.  

Knowing that our passwords are stored securely within the vault has been a big improvement. It eliminates the need for users to store passwords in less secure locations.

We want to integrate it with our IT service management platform and our SOC solution, but that's a future project.

The password protection itself is the most important feature. It's something we didn't have before.

Moreover, the interface is intuitive. It is clear and user-friendly. 

The session monitoring and recording feature is also a good feature feature, but we're currently experiencing an issue with session monitoring not working correctly. We're working with CyberArk to resolve it.

We aren't able to view active sessions or historical recordings of sessions.

It is complex, which is something I know CyberArk is working on. They're trying to simplify certain administration tasks because a common critique is the level of complexity. But overall, we can do everything we need with it.

So, CyberArk could still focus on making it more user-friendly.

I have been using it for a year. 

So far, we haven't had any scalability problems.

We have around 50 licensed users – primarily administrators. We currently manage about 5,000 accounts with CyberArk.

Sometimes, the initial response time is a bit slow, but once the customer service and support take on a case, they resolve issues quickly.

CyberArk handled the primary setup tasks. We worked with a partner to implement additional components and now have the knowledge to manage the solution ourselves.

The implementation process took around eight months. 

There has been an ROI. 

We expect to see a full return on investment within the next three years. This was part of our long-term security plan.

It is expensive, but the cost is justified considering the security it provides. Compared to other solutions, it is costly. We have not tried other solutions, but the price is high. 

We only license Password Vault.

My company evaluated another solution like Delinea but preferred CyberArk due to its robustness and flexibility.

I like its flexibility, while adding some complexity, allows us to fully customize the solution to our needs.

One of the main advantages is the way we can connect from outside. We use a portal that provides secure access to our systems without needing a VPN. We just scan a QR code, and we're connected. We do not need to use a password and we are in through the QR code scan. 

I would recommend using it. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It's a very complete solution for what we need.

Our primary use case is the scheduled password change management of Windows, Linux, and Cisco privileged local user passwords, as well as providing internal applications using the REST API credentials to access and maintain network elements.

Utilizing the CyberArk Password Vault DR implementation, we have a ready resource as a hedge against network issues caused by seasonal hurricanes through having a replicated DR vault in an out-of-state facility.

The implementation of the CyberArk Privileged Access Management has reduced the total labor cost of doing quarterly password change management (PCM) on the thousands of network elements (routers & switches), servers, and workstations throughout our nationwide network.

In addition to reducing the direct labor cost of the PCM procedures, the automation aspect has reduced risk that has previously resulted in many lost man-days resolving issues which previously was attributed to human-factor error during PCM procedures.

Utilizing the Central Policy Manager to provide policy programmable password change management automation, which can be configured either globally, or by using the individual PlatformIDs which limits the effect of human error on a nationwide implementation of network devices that are remotely co-located and not readily accessible. 

The implementation of the PSM proxy has reduced the specific risk of "insider attacks" on our domain controllers and SLDAP servers by eliminating direct user login by an open secure connection on the user's behalf without ever revealing the privileged credentials.

My personal wishlist of features has been fulfilled with versions 12.6 and 13.2, which provide a host of improvements that the administrator community has been asking for.  

With these version releases, that leaves my only "unfulfilled" product improvement request to be the creation of some kind of memo field for each device account, which could be used, in our network at least, to leave a note about the device for either the security or network engineering team members.

We originally implemented the product in 2014 as a compliance mandate and fully integrated the application and functionality in 2017. We have just finished our fourth product upgrade and expanded our enterprise vault space to meet growing demand.

My implementation has been very stable over the past seven years, only having minor hiccups caused by "human error" during the "accidental" editing of a configuration file.

We currently store over 50,000 privileged passwords, and I know if our network doubled tomorrow, the product would scale to meet the increased demand.

There are two specific organizations within CyberArk that can provide customer assistance.

The customer success team is there with serious advanced knowledge to assist when things are not flowing. In my specific case, while I was learning to be a PAM administrator, I routinely contacted our customer success team with questions related to "Where can I find this documentation?", "How does this work?" and my favorite, "How can I put my permission back onto a safe?"

The other team is the professional services team, whose job is to be able to come in, analyze an issue, and correct it with the utmost speed. These are also highly experienced individuals that can be brought in the expand your implementation as needed.

Positive

Prior to the implementation of the CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, the security operations utilized unencrypted spreadsheets to store privileged passwords, which became a POAM when discovered during a routine security audit.

Our organization utilized the CyberArk professional support team to come in and provide a local, hands-on planning and implementation approach. This implementation methodology actually reduced long-term costs by making sure the implementation was done according to CyberArk's Best Practices.

Our organization utilized CyberArk's professional support team to come in and provide a local, hands-on planning and implementation approach. This implementation methodology actually reduced long-term costs by making sure the implementation was done according to CyberArk's Best Practices.

Our annual support costs are offset by the reduced labor costs within the SOCC environment, as the product has automated most of the password change management procedures, allowing labor to be focused on other topics.

While the IAM space is heating up with new vendors, both CyberArk development and the product team seem to be ahead of the curve, with features and products to enable enterprise customers the ability to secure their networks and break the intrusion cycle.

CyberArk was our first venture into a secure password vault and was implemented at the recommendation of our federal customer.

The product takes some time to learn. That said, CyberArk Software offers both a customer success team as well as paid professional support to assist.  

The customer success team has always seemed to be in my corner when needed, bringing insight and assistance when I was unable to resolve some of my "self-created issues".

We use CyberArk to secure the last resort accounts by introducing dual control approval, ticket validation, temporary access, and regular password rotation.

It also allows us to introduce location-aware access controls with multiple sites having access to specific location-protected content.

Finally, the session management capabilities allowed us to introduce delegated accounts to secure access to all sorts of devices in an easy way, but without losing the individual traceability. 

It allows us to comply with the regulator requirements allowing us to operate in the different countries and to fulfil the security and compliance requirements.

In the end, it secures all the highly privileged accounts and protects the company from internal and external threat actors.

The solution is multifaceted and includes session management, password management, temporary access, ticketing validation, API access, single sign-on integration, load balancing, and high availability principles.

The credentials management capability is key to ensuring that the credentials are kept secure and that access to them is done on a temporary and event-driven basis.

The session isolation reduces the risk of exposure of the credentials and applying simpler network controls.

Web access allows the introduction of location-aware controlled access so that different locations can only access the data that is allowed to be retrieved from their sites allowing centralisation but fulfilling the regional requirements.

The product is very vaulting-focused. I'd love to see it expanding its capabilities a bit further into areas like just-in-time elevation, and access with non-vaulted credentials.

The upgrade options are good but could be further simplified.

The high availability options could be improved, and the load distribution as well for both the vaults and the credentials managers.

The web interface should allow having multiple sites for location-aware access control within the same web server.

I've used the solution for more than ten years.

Within our organization, our security requirements, which are set by our customers, require CIS compliance. Those requirements mandated securing privileged passwords with encryption, both in transit and at rest. CyberArk PAM was selected as our solution, and CyberArk's Professional Services team conducted the initial installation and implementation. 

Three years later, I was tasked with implementing the product more fully, integrating more of the out-of-the-box privileged password change management automation features of the product within our environment.  

The out-of-the-box functionality, Windows OS Privileged local account password change management, was the first automation feature implemented, and by itself, the automation reduced the man-hour requirement for quarterly local privileged password change management enough to provide a complete ROI on the initial licensing investment.

Continued implementation of more of the out-of-the-box PAM functionality continues to produce man-hour savings, which frees up our security operations group to have more time to monitor, investigate, and resolve potential security issues on the network.

Our implementation is air-gapped from the outside world, and as such, we utilize a completely on-prem solution. Our highest risk is from privileged insiders, and CyberArk's answer to this challenge was the implementation of a Privileged Session Manager (PSM). With PSM, we were able to secure, control, and more importantly, monitor privileged access to highly critical network servers by using PSM to manage accounts and create detailed session audits and video recordings of all IT administrator privileged sessions on our most critical servers. The established sessions on the target systems are fully isolated and the privileged account credentials are never exposed to the end-users or their client applications and devices.

CyberArk PAM is a very broad product as everyone's requirements for implementation are different. In our particular case, the initial implementation was planned and developed by people who didn't know our specific network requirements, so the initial implementation needed to be tweaked over time. While this is normal, at the time all these "major" changes required CyberArk professional services to come in-plant and "assist" with the changes.  

Over time, the CyberArk product team has made this process simpler and has enabled more local administrator configuration and update functionality, which doesn't require sub-contracts.

Our program has been using CyberArk since 2014, although it was not fully implementated until I took it over in 2017.  

The product is very stable, limited only by the Windows Operating System is it built upon.

This product seems to be scalable to any size. Providing vault cluster services, distributed vaults, and DR vault implementations, the product is truly ready for global implementation.

Tier One customer service is not as responsive or as knowledgeable as I would like, however, once your service request is sent to a Tier Two support engineer, the knowledge and experience level increases dramatically.

In addition, within the CyberArk support environment, Technical forums are available in which other customers are very willing to share their experience, and offer possible solutions to non-critical issues.

Positive

This was an initial implementation to meet the regulatory requirements of a federal customer.

In our specific case, the initial setup and configuration were very complex, which was a result of the initial design being developed by our internal engineers and CyberArk professional services, neither of which had the "tribal knowledge" of how the network functioned, or how the processes of network engineering and security had been implemented.

The initial implementation was a joint project with CyberArk Professional Services and our internal Systems Engineers. The Professional Services engineers were very knowledgeable regarding the implementation of their products.

Our program realized the total ROI after the implementation of policy-based automated password change management, which resulted in a significant reduction in man-hours required to conduct password change management (PCM) on a multitude of network elements. 

For licensing on a localized on-prem installation, the CorePAS licensing model enables the most critical component products within the PAM stack, enabling multiple layers of security which can take a while to implement.

At the time of the initial implementation (2013-2014), after looking at the field of available products, CyberArk PAM was significantly more mature than the other available products. For that reason, CyberArk PAM was selected.

The greatest issue that I experienced with the implementation of the CyberArk PAM solution was inter-departmental politics regarding change. To resolve this, I relied on the CyberArk Customer Success team to assist with developing a strategy to get all of the stakeholders to accept the changes. Every CyberArk administrator needs to spend time learning about their customer success team since their purpose is to assist with making sure you have the knowledge you need to make sure your implementation is successful.

I use the solution for administration. If the customer requires Alero or HTML, we will deploy the solution in that particular environment. Otherwise, if the end users are accessing the solution via VPN or from inside the network, we will not deploy Alero or HTML. We will instead focus on CyberArk's core PAM, which includes the vault password rotation component, the web interface component, the jump server, and PPA. These are CyberArk's four main components which we deploy for every customer.

CyberArk has a lot of modules, such as Enterprise Password Vault, which is the heart of the solution and needs to be up and running at any time. Privileged accounts and session recordings get stored inside the vault itself.

Likewise, we can configure high availability for the vault, like an active/passive or an active/active configuration. Replication disaster recovery is also supported.

CyberArk is also capable of rotating the credentials for a lot of endpoints. It has the CPM plugins by default for password management, Windows and Linux, as well as databases like Oracle and MS SQL, and can also rotate to some network devices like Cisco 9000.

We have Privileged Access Management, a general server between the user's and the target's machine. All of the sessions go from that server to the target endpoints. Once the end user disconnects the session, the session recordings and live monitoring will be uploaded to the vault. That recording will be stored for 180 days for auditing.

Another component is Privileged Threat Analytics. It detects any threats on target machines. For example, an end user might connect to a Linux endpoint and try to run privileged commands. Those commands are customizable and can be defined in the PTA as well. Whenever those users run those particular commands on the target, the PTA will report suspicious activity and report to security admins in the organization via mail or even on the web portal. We have a separate tab for security.

Within security events, these particular suspicious activities will be detected as threats and attain a risk score, "This is the user who connected to this particular target and ran these particular commands or applications."

CyberArk has a remote access solution called CyberArk Remote Access Alero. CyberArk also supports HTML gateways so that users can connect from outside the network without a VPN connection.

The solution has many advantages, such as the user interfaces and remote app features when using local applications when sessions are getting established over RDP, SSH, database, and web browsers. It is easy for administration as well.

Password management for all the endpoints needs improvement.

CyberArk can handle password management for Windows, Linux, databases, and network devices. However, there are solutions like Tenable or Skybox, Palo Alto, and other security devices for which we cannot provide password rotations on CyberArk. CyberArk should look into development for those particular plugins. I heard they had developed them, but they are not widely available. So if, for example, a customer requires CPM's password management plugin for Tenable, they need to send a request to CyberArk themselves so that the CyberArk team will then sell it to the customer. It does not come with an implementation license. It's a separate thing that a customer needs to purchase. CyberArk will assign it to that particular customer ID, and that plugin will not be supported for other customers. But those are their business tactics. They will not reveal all their plugins, only the basic ones.

I have worked with CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault for four years on a regular basis.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support is very poor. We handle implementation for our clients, so we do not handle support after. We do the knowledge transfer and if they face some challenges, we will show them how to troubleshoot as well as the documentation. We provide everything to the customer as they are not experts in CyberArk.

If the customer faces any issue, they will raise a case with CyberArk in the technical portal. But once they raise a case, CyberArk will not respond.

Let us say I opened a case this morning. Initially, they will respond, "I am the technical expert handling this particular case. Please provide me the logs." Their first reply will be that they want the logs. The customer will then gather the logs somehow and attach those logs to the case.

However, it will take two days for technical support to investigate their logs and reply. Even after two days, they will reply, and will say, "I am transferring this case to the higher level expert" that is, L2 or L3, "they will get back to you." 

The initial reply will be given by the L1 engineer who doesn't know the product or how to troubleshoot that situation, so every case will go to the L2 level or L3. The time taken in the process is too heavy. So even if I open the case as a "severe" case, even if it is not severe, they will reply to say that this particular case is not severe, so I have to keep it as "medium" or "low." As a result, customers consider hiring support from my company.

Neutral

With CyberArk, we have the direct installer file and setup files for each component, such as Password Vault Web Access, CPM, PSM, and PTA. The implementation engineer should install every component. We also need to have servers for each component. We need to request a set of servers per the architecture and the components count. Once we get those servers, Windows or Linux servers, we need to copy the setup files onto them. We need to deploy the setup files by installing and taking some steps. It contains manual and automatic installation, with CyberArk providing some PowerShell scripts themselves. With those scripts, we can do the installation automatically. 

By comparison, with BeyondTrust, whatever the module is, the virtual appliance is built by the BeyondTrust team itself with all the configurations. We just need to deploy it in our organization network and do the initial networking configuration, and later, we can directly do the integrations.

Also, CyberArk recommends we do hardening for each component for security purposes. After hardening, unwanted firewalls and services will be disabled on the operating systems, which makes the product more secure.

Though there are some efforts required from the implementation engineer, the installation is straightforward. I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten.

Users will clearly understand the solution once they go through the architecture diagram.

To connect to the target systems and view the accounts, view the session recordings, and check if the system health of all the components is working well. Any admin-related task will be done in the web portal, Password Vault Web Access, a separate component in CyberArk.

CyberArk is one of the better solutions which users will want to implement in their organization for securing their privileged accounts and access, and session monitoring for auditing. If they can deploy CyberArk, it's a good product.

We use the product to store system accounts. 

CyberArk is a good and adaptive solution. It is easy to adopt and install. It is easy for every use case. 

The challenge with the product is pricing since it's expensive. It also needs to improve the customization. We encountered some stability issues as well. 

I have been working with the product for more than 10 years. 

I would rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. 

My company has more than 20,000 users for the product. I would rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

We have a direct connection with the CyberArk leadership. However, the tool's support is not user-friendly. They will charge you for premium support and push you towards it. 

Neutral

I have used BeyondTrust before. 

The solution's setup is easy. There were some challenges while managing from environment to environment. We experienced some glitches during the installation process. 

The product's licensing is yearly. I would rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. We only have the licensing contract with the product and everything else is managed in-house with a team size of four members. 

The most common use case is when you need to hide the management for the servers, switches, routers, et cetera. You can use privileged access for remote use cases.

In my company, we have a lot of servers, and the problem is when the users want to access these platforms. You can access all the architecture and knowledge with this product. It provides more access and visibility.

The password rotation and cyber gateway have been quite useful. It's a solution that allows you to search for passwords for your servers and accounts. This is the most feature power.

The solution is quite stable.

It is scalable on the cloud. 

The implementation is hard. For example, the on-prem implementation specifically is really hard to deploy. 

The solution does not scale well on-premises. 

This is an expensive product.

It's hard to get help from support if you are not certified. 

I've been using the solution for five years. 

The product is really stable. You just need to deploy a higher viability solution. However, you need to do a lot of budgeting to deploy that higher viability solution. You need at least 12 servers. It's really, really difficult to have a budget for that.

It is easy to scale on the cloud. It is difficult to expand it on-premises. 

We have 30 people using the solution in my company.

At this point, we do not have plans to increase usage. 

The technical support is really excellent. However, if you don't have a certification, it is impossible for you to receive technical support.

We previously used BeyondTrust and Centrify, among other solutions.

The initial setup is pretty difficult and it takes a while to put into place. 

You need at least six servers to deploy it and it's really difficult to have a budget for that - plus, the implementation itself is really hard. You likely have to dedicate one week to deploy the solution and another week or two to onboard all the accounts.

Basically, it's pretty complex to implement. 

We've used a consultant to assist us with the implementation. 

The ROI is really quick. If you have a compromised account, it can compromise your infrastructure, and the loss of the business is really high. With this product and the protection it offers, you can witness ROI immediately.

You need a large number of servers, and therefore it gets expensive to deploy the product.

The license is expensive. It costs us around $200 per user. 

We are using a privileged cloud and an on-prem cloud, an on-prem APD. We have a hybrid setup.

I'd advise potential new users to have very good scripting at the outset. If you don't, you'll have difficulties in the long run. 

While the solution is expensive, it's excellent. I would rate it ten out of ten. You definitely get what you pay for. 

I work with the infrastructure access team in my organization and we have CyberArk as a primary solution along with a number of components for Privileged Access Management (PAM) and monitoring within the privileged access sphere.

We began with CyberArk in 2018, when we procured the licenses for CyberArk and all its components including the PAM suite and Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM). Our management took a call and we had to do a proof of concept to evaluate the product and see what it was capable of. As a product owner, I had six months to complete this. We evaluated a few specific use cases and presented our findings of the CyberArk's capability to management around the end of the third month.

Since then, CyberArk's Privileged Access Management is still our central solution for the entire estate, including all our servers (Windows/Unix), databases, devices, and so on, with around 5,000 to 8,000 users globally. Essentially, all access is managed through Privileged Access Management. That said, I am not sure to what extent all of the findings were carried forward after our initial evaluation because a lot of changes have happened within the organization. Our overall threat assessment, criteria, and even the framework has changed, now leaning towards a Zero Trust kind of strategy.

For instance, even for the tools that are used within the Privileged Access Management suite, there is a tighter alignment towards enterprise architecture, and we currently have a highly-evolved enterprise architecture group from which everything is driven. Earlier, individual units would have had their own licenses to see what they can do with them, but now things are more closely aligned with the overall enterprise architecture strategy. Given this, some of CyberArk's tools such as EPM have somewhat dropped off from the list of our priorities.

As for how we have deployed CyberArk, it's currently all on-premises. We do have a roadmap for transformation to the cloud, but I am not sure what kind of place CyberArk will have in that, as it depends on the enterprise architect's view on the cloud transformation. We have had some discussions around what to do about the cloud portion of our assets (e.g. VMs and such), what kind of monitoring we need, and so on, and I think that, among other apps, Splunk will likely become part of our toolset when it comes to the cloud. I believe we are also evaluating CyberArk's Cloud Entitlements Manager on this roadmap.

From a functional point of view, I would not have a concrete idea of how CyberArk has improved our organization because that information is better provided by someone from the operations team. Those kind of evaluations are typically done at a much higher level, probably at COO or a similar level, and they have a close alignment with the enterprise architecture group.

On a practical note, with CyberArk there is integration with your identity management system such that, when done properly, you can ensure that anyone from an administrator to production support personnel will gain the relevant access they need in good time. PAM offers integration with Active Directory, LDAP, and so on, and is fairly compliant with these kinds of approaches to identity.

I'm no longer the product owner for PAM, but I can say that the most useful feature is the vault functionality, which keeps all your passwords secure in a digital vault.

The second most useful feature is the monitoring of your privileged sessions. So you have an audit trail, where any privileged access session has to be authorized, and you have access to all the relevant monitoring controls.

When I was a component owner for PAM's Privileged Threat Analytics (PTA) component, what I wanted was a clear mapping to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a framework which has a comprehensive list of use cases. We reached out to the vendor and asked them how much coverage they have of the uses cases found on MITRE, which would have given us a better view of things while I was the product owner. Unfortunately they did not have the capability of mapping onto MITRE's framework at that time.

PTA is essentially the monitoring interface of the broker (e.g. Privileged Access Management, the Vault, CPM, PSM, etc.), and it's where you can capture your broker bypass and perform related actions. For this reason, we thought that this kind of mapping would be required, but CyberArk informed us that they did not have the capability we had in mind with regard to MITRE ATT&CK.

I am not sure what the situation is now, but it would definitely help to have that kind of alignment with one of the more well-known frameworks like MITRE. For CyberArk as a vendor, it would also help them to clearly spell out in which areas they have full functionality and in which ares they have partial or none. Of course, it also greatly benefits the customers when they're evaluating the product.

I've been using CyberArk Privileged Access Management since 2018.

CyberArk's PAM does what it's supposed to do, based on the interactions I've had with the folks from operations. There are the usual operational challenges, but it fulfills its basic purpose.

Stability assessments are conducted by a separate team that does risk assessments, so I don't have a lot of insight into this aspect, but considering that the product has been running for quite some time now and it's still the central solution for access management, I would reckon that it's a pretty stable product.

There are different categories out there when it comes to scalability. In the case of bringing in new target systems, then sure, you can bring in what you need based on your licensing criteria. In terms of bringing in target systems which are not covered by the list of connectors that you have, this too is possible as there is scope for customization. Overall, I think it's fairly scalable and it does give decent support on the scalability front.

Our onboarding is progressing smoothly and at a steady pace. With the onboarding, you have new users coming on, and because it's a central solution, the rollout is global. There are even plans for extending the department in terms of increasing the redundancy of components, which is largely determined by operational performance reviews and so forth.

In my personal experience as product owner assigned to various components, there have been challenges with the support at times. I would say that it has scope for improvement.

Neutral

I have used a similar solution, but it was closer to a desktop password manager kind of tool. It was made by IBM and it was something you could actually install on your desktop and manage your passwords around that.

Later on IBM developed the tool into something more enterprise-oriented, and it turned into what we would classify as a privileged access management solution. But otherwise, CyberArk was probably the first fully-fledged solution in this sphere that I have used.

The initial part of the setup was quite good. When it came to Windows, we had success in the beginning stages, but later on we had to have a number of discussions with CyberArk with respect to the 'groups' nomenclature, as we wanted to have a very clear standard that could be used consistently throughout the organization.

The first iteration was mostly fast and easy, however at one point we realized that there was much more detailing needed to be done. So we went through another iteration with a more detailed design and came up with more comprehensive coverage of groups, or roles, as you might say. In total, I think it was around two years before the Windows part was comprehensively addressed, but after that, it was covered quite quickly. 

Before CyberArk's PAM, we had a legacy tool that was managing the privileged access for Windows and we had that decommissioned around this time, which was a victory of sorts.

The first step of the implementation strategy was putting all the passwords in the vault, thereby securing them. We also had a tool called Application Identity Manager, which we used for mitigation of the hard-coded passwords. Only after the vault was in place alongside Application Identity Manager, were steps taken to deploy the PAM suite.

Back in 2015, we had about three or four full-time CyberArk Professional Services folks undertake an effort to implement it, but that project failed. All that was achieved was the central vault deployment, and I think they also had Application Identity Manager installed at the time, but nothing apart from that. So it didn't take off the way it was supposed to, possibly due to a misalignment with the top management and the enterprise architecture viewpoint. But later on, and toward the second half of 2016, things started picking up again and further steps were taken from 2017 onward to deploy the Privileged Access Management functionality.

Throughout the PAM deployment, there was a fairly large vendor team that we were working with. I reckon the vendor team size was around 45 to 50 people. Within the organization, there was another large team that was supporting with various roles, such as in engineering, architecture, operations, governance, and so on. In total, there were around 50 of the vendor's team and maybe 20 to 30 roles from within the organization. There were other layers of responsibility, such as the risk team, but all those were kind of on the outside of the deployment.

I don't have much access to the facts and figures surrounding ROI, but I would reckon that with the Zero Trust risk strategy that we have, the product does match some of our key challenges. For one, we have the vault solution, so the passwords are safe up there. And then we have brokering in place for some of the key platforms, so I would say that these positives, along with our strategy and roadmap, will decide the fate of the future of CyberArk within the organization.

I'm aware that the organization had purchased licensing for almost all of CyberArk's solutions including licensing for PTA, EPM, and the Application Identity Manager. But when it comes to PSM, this is one of the components where there's an additional charge for any extra PSMs that you want to deploy. I believe that there's some rider where the vendor has a bit of leeway to, at times, charge a premium on whatever additional services you may require above the board.

Based on my experience as a product owner, I would advise, firstly, to set up an enterprise security architecture as authority within the organization, and ensure that it is closely aligned with your business. Once that is set up, then the enterprise security architecture should determine the priorities of the business and, accordingly, you can lay out a roadmap and strategy.

From a product perspective, CyberArk may or may not fit into your organization based on what strategy you have detailed, or it may or may not fit your requirements. So I would definitely not recommend purchasing the tool first and then determining what to do with it next.

Regarding automation, we are adopting DevOps for the positives it brings, such as cost savings, efficiency, etc., yet there needs to be some checks and balances. Having a fully automated solution would require you to think through the security aspects very carefully. That is why alignment with the enterprise security architecture is of great importance when it comes to securing access across environments in an identity management solution.

CyberArk's PAM is based on the concept of identity, such that a user logs in with his or her identity. So whatever systems the user accesses, there is an audit trail that is tied back to that same identity. This can happen across multiple environments based on factors such as the separation of duties, where certain engineers may not be allowed access to certain areas of development. These checks and balances occur when we give access to those kinds of rules and permissions. There are some targets we have for automation, but if it's fully automated it wouldn't be all throughout our organization as we have found there are some pitfalls with full automation.

Now, when you bring the cloud into the picture, as with our own transformation roadmap, you can't just put a tool in front of you and then expect everything to fall into place from on-premises to the cloud. It does not work that way. You need to have a sound strategy from your enterprise security perspective and only then can you ensure that things will fall into place.

Concerning the UI, PAM has an administrative dashboard and everything, but from a monitoring perspective, we also rely on additional tools apart from what CyberArk offers. For least privilege and managing secrets, there's a tool from CyberArk for that, but I'm not sure we have any plans on using that solution.

Overall, I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Management a seven out of ten.

CyberArk's Privileged Access Management solution covers a whole range of features, like privileged web access, private vault, privileged session manager rights for a session in isolation, privileged threat analytics for analytics, and private sessions. We also use CyberArk's Application Access Manager, which includes their credential providers, such as agents and run servers. Then there is a central credential provider, which is API-based credential retrieval, and DAP or Conjur. This is more of a DevOps model for credential provisioning. We also have the Central Policy Manager, which rotates the credentials associated with unprivileged or servers accounts. It's a huge environment. 

Those are all the different functions we use. We initially purchased CyberArk for privileged access manager and session isolation of privileged users. By privileged users, I mean main admins, global admins, and preps like Azure or Office 365. Our initial use case was to manage those users who could drastically impact the environment if their credentials were compromised.

After we purchased the product, we had a third party on it. They suggested we also leverage CyberArk as part of the platform for managing service accounts, i.e. go out and proactively rotate credentials that are running or ordering services. That's another kind of big use case that we started implementing a couple of years. It's long work. It is tough to do, there's a lot of cases where it just doesn't work right, but overall it's been pretty valuable.

From a security perspective, CyberArk PAM gives us a lot of control and visibility into what our privileged users are doing. In terms of securing our cloud-native apps, we're just getting into deploying things to Azure, AWS, etc., and DAP brings a lot of value to that because it is cloud-agnostic credential retrieval. Azure has their key vaults, and AWS has their version if you are a multi-cloud solution. CyberArk's Secrets Manager, or DAP, brings a lot of value because you only have to learn how to integrate your apps with one solution that can be deployed across multiple clouds. 

I will say that CyberArk is struggling with some of the cloud integrations. For instance, Azure has a native identity solution, and Microsoft keeps causing issues with their ability to identify the hosts calling back. Some cloud providers are trying to lock CyberArk and other tools out of their environment and force you to use their native one. With that said, I don't use the other functions. I don't use the containerization Kubernetes integration or anything like that. We're not at that point yet. One of my significant concerns about investing a lot of time in CyberArk Conjur or DAP solution is that Microsoft seems to be trying to push them out of that space, and if they do that, then all of that work is null and void.

In our initial use case, we found CyberArk's privileged session management functionality to be incredibly flexible. It's challenging to write these plug-ins, but if you have somebody with a development background, you can write all sorts of custom connections to support different functional applications. We've written over a hundred custom connectors ourselves that allow us to do all types of privileged session management for various applications. On top of that, the rest of the API-based central credential providers allow us to get away from credentials that may be hard-coded in the script or some application. 

CyberArk's web console isn't in a great state. Over the last three years, if not more, it has been transitioning from what they call the "classic UI" to its modern interface. However, there are a lot of features that you can only use in the classic interface. Hence, each version seems to put more makeup on the modern interface, but all of the complex functionality you need is still in the classic UI. 

I'm not sure they've figured out how to transition, and they're kind of in a weird state. So, while CyberArk has made strides, the web interface is painful, particularly as an administrator, because you have to bounce between these different user interfaces. It is an incredibly complex solution that requires at least a dedicated employee or more to maintain it, support it, and understand it thoroughly. If you don't have that, it's just not the right solution for you because it is very complicated. 

Many of the infrastructure folks who use the product dislike it because it complicates their workflow. They get a little less control, and they have to go through a specific solution. It proactively logs in for them, which obfuscates some of the issues that they may be troubleshooting. And I think some of the consumers aren't big fans of the product. Also, I feel that in the last year or so, CyberArk has been pushing very hard for customers to go to their cloud solution. It doesn't have the same flexibility as the on-premise version, which is problematic because that's where I see a lot of value in the solution.

I've been using CyberArk PAM for about four years now.

CyberArk support isn't the worst, but it's certainly not the best. I'd give it a six out of 10. They were responsive. After you submit a ticket, you get the typical response. You gather all the logs and send them, and then they do some analysis. They typically send you back to get more specific logs, so it's a standard support experience. I would not say it's great, but it is not terrible either.

Overall, as a partner in our digital transformation, CyberArk has been great. The technology adds a lot of value, but they're also very much engaged and concerned. The customer success manager very much wants to make sure we're getting value out of the tool. I guess my only concern there is that they are pushing very heavily for customers to switch to their new cloud solutions that may or may not fit our needs or expectations. I am worried that they're going to push even harder. For example, CyberArk might start offering features only available in the cloud solution that would make our future somewhat tenuous depending on what's going on. So my only hangup is that they're pushing cloud solutions that I don't think are very mature yet.

Neutral

The environment's architecture is very complex, depending on your use cases, and I'm talking about CyberArk as a whole. Their past solution — their AM solution — and all of the other solutions bundled together are straightforward, and it all needs to work together. Depending on your use case and the connected components you need to have or build, you must learn a lot. So, it's not as simple a thing to deploy — at least on-premise. It isn't straightforward. Our environment comprises 20 to 30 servers that we had to spin up and connect. Disaster recovery has to be thoroughly vetted, discussed, and documented because as you onboard and manage those privileged accounts, you need a way to get to them if something goes wrong.

It took about a month to get the product running and several months to onboard users. And when we start talking about Application Access Manager, that's ongoing, and I think that'll probably be ongoing for a very long time. We were targeting our specific use cases, so we started with interactive users. The whole idea was to restrict, manage, and monitor those interactive users. Our rollout proceeded from the most privileged users to the less privileged users. Then we started targeting service accounts and that kind of stuff. So it was a phased approach from highest risk to lowest risk to lower risk.

CyberArk PAM requires a lot of maintenance. Right now, we have about one and a half people, but I would say we need to add several more people to do a better job and add a lot of functionality. It requires a lot of maintenance and monitoring. They've relied on many different Microsoft features to secure the privileged session manager. It requires a lot of tuning, monitoring, and managing those solutions. They use AppLocker to restrict and isolate these running sessions, and AppLocker breaks all the time, so you have to go in and troubleshoot why it's broken and tweak it. That could mean adding a new rule or updating an application. It is a lot of maintenance, depending on your use case. But then again, we have gone very hard into privileged session management and developed over a hundred custom connectors. Another customer might deploy RDP and call it a day, drastically reducing maintenance.

If you ask me the ROI, I'm not sure I could give you an exact number. Security tools are pretty tricky when it comes to that. But if you're adopting a risk-based approach, this substantially reduces risk. It brought a lot of visibility and allowed us to monitor all of our privileged users, so it is valuable from the perspective of KPI, modern solutions, and risk reduction. If we were to score this on an internal risk review, our previous risk would rank four out of five, and we've lowered this to a low severity risk.

CyberArk had just changed switched their licensing model to perpetual licenses when we purchased, including the whole PAM Suite. Before we bought it, they were licensing each function individually, which got complicated and very expensive. When we decided to buy it, it was much more straightforward and still quite expensive, but it brings a lot of value and risk reduction to the organization. 

In the last year or so, it's my understanding that they have switched from a perpetual licensing model to pushing companies to a subscription-based model. I have not dealt with this yet, so I'm not sure my feedback on licensing would be too valuable because they've moved away from the license type we purchased.

This was our first foray into the PAM space. We did a proof of concept evaluating three different solutions, so CyberArk was the clear winner. I don't want to speak ill of any other solutions, but I will say that CyberArk's architecture was much more secure. Other competing solutions may leverage an agent that is installed on your local machine and runs your privileged applications locally, leaving a lot to be desired from a security perspective. 

CyberArk uses remote desktop gateways similar to Microsoft's RDS functionality, and it abstracts that privileged application from your workstation. So even if you're compromised, a malicious actor on your laptop or workstation would not be able to get to that privileged application. This was very valuable to us. Other solutions did not have that functionality.

As it stands today, I would rate CyberArk PAM nine out of 10. However, I'm concerned about the future of the platform. While I've had nothing but great experiences so far, I have concerns about how they've been pushing that cloud solution in the last year and a half. I feel like they're going to pressure us to move to the cloud even though they're not mature enough in the cloud. 

Rather than create a cloud-native version, they've migrated their on-premise solution to the cloud, but they don't allow cloud customers to access the backend, which I recommend all the time as an on-premise user. Instead, you have to submit a support ticket and have their support do things on your behalf, which delays your ability to work with the tool. Furthermore, they may not be willing to make the modifications you want because it would affect their ability to impact the solution consistently. CyberArk designed the on-premise version to be incredibly flexible, and I have never found a use case where I can't do the work I want to do. Their cloud model discards a lot of that flexibility, which is where I see a lot of value, so I have concerns about the future of the tool.

Also, I'd like to point out that service account management is incredibly hard, particularly in a company that's been around for a while. Any company looking to adopt service account management needs to know that it's not as easy as vendors make it sound. Many things don't work right out of the box, so the most important lesson we've learned is to calibrate the expectations of senior management when it comes to service account management because it is a lot harder than anybody thinks. You're likely to break things in the process of trying to manage these accounts. 

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 eight 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.