What Are the Costs Associated with a PAM Solution?

Investing in cybersecurity is indispensable for companies of all sizes and industries, since threats such as data leaks and hacking attacks generate great financial losses.

Thus, one of the most important measures in this regard is to rely on a PAM solution, which contributes to avoiding these risks through the combination of various technologies and strategies.

However, not all vendors guarantee a good cost-benefit ratio when offering this solution. In this article, we will show you what PAM costs are and why senhasegura is your best option.

What Is a PAM Solution?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) consists of a set of tools and strategies that ensure digital security as they enable the control of privileged access in IT structures.

With this solution, one can avoid damage caused by the actions of malicious attackers and mistakes by employees who compromise privileged credentials.

PAM involves a number of strategies, but its main goal is to apply the principle of least privilege, restricting the permissions of human users or machines and providing only the necessary access to perform their tasks.

Today, many experts understand PAM is one of the key solutions to promote cybersecurity and achieve an excellent Return on Investment (ROI).

Why Is PAM Necessary?

PAM is indispensable to promoting information security and avoiding the high costs generated by a data breach.

To get a sense, Kaspersky surveyed 5,500 organizations worldwide and concluded that the average loss a company has from a violation is $551,000. When we talk specifically about small and medium-sized companies, this cost is $38,000.

Moreover, 90% of the surveyed companies had to face security-related problems and, in 46% of cases, the result was the loss of confidential data.

Forrester Research also conducted a study that revealed the damage caused by a violation. Your approach shows how this impact would occur. Check it out:

Costs with professionals for damage repairs;
Management of the impact on the brand through the public relations service;
Costs for notifying customers of the breach;
Lawyers’ fees that deal with legal impacts;
Payment of legal agreements;
Expenses with the repair of damages caused to customers;
Penalties and fines;
Downtime of activities with loss of productivity; and
Reduction in share prices.

Preventing cyber threats is an excellent way to avoid data breach losses, but what would be the amount of these risks? Most cybersecurity managers indicate that in order to have this answer, it is necessary to multiply the probability of an incident by the financial loss it can cause.

In practice, the data covered in this topic show us that PAM costs are significantly lower than the financial impact caused by invasions, provided that the appropriate vendor is chosen.

What Is PAM For?

As mentioned earlier, PAM consists of a set of technologies that allows one to control and monitor the actions of privileged users, whether human or machine.

These users can interact with critical systems, being able to delete accounts, erase or modify data, configure a firewall, and install and uninstall software.

Through PAM, one can prevent the misuse of privileged access, limiting permissions to what is necessary to perform tasks and avoiding financial losses caused by insider or external threats.

In practice, PAM has several capabilities, such as preventing privileged users from requiring local passwords and centrally managing access to heterogeneous systems.

In this way, one can prevent the actions of malicious attackers from succeeding and, if violations occur, they will be detected immediately, preventing hackers from remaining in a system for a long period without anyone noticing.

PAM Costs: How Much Will My Company Invest to Implement the Solution?

With the increase in the number of cyberattacks, it is essential to invest in digital security measures, such as PAM. However, just considering the price of the solution deployment software does not guarantee the best cost-benefit for your company.

This is because this service involves additional costs that are usually hidden, and make up a sum known as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Several factors directly influence the calculation of the TCO, and the good news is that we, from senhasegura, offer our customers the best TCO on the market.

The first PAM costs you should note are related to its licensing. In this regard, the following capabilities are considered:

Account discovery and activation;
Integration with adjacent systems;
Ease of deployment and scalability;
Just-in-time methods;
Records and reporting;
Privileged access governance;
Privileged credential management;
Elevation and delegation of privileges;
Privileged session management;
Privileged task automation; and
Secrets management.

Ideally, there should be a platform that encompasses all use cases. Thus, the customer does not need to acquire numerous solutions, which increases PAM costs. We, from senhasegura, offer integrated modules, which meet the needs considered by Gartner.

In addition, our solution has maximum scalability, allowing new modules to be easily added to the PAM implementation without requiring major investments in deployment and training.

When investing in a PAM solution, it is also critical to take infrastructure costs into account. Many vendors require complex, costly structures due to the need for additional virtual machines such as password vaults and web servers.

We offer PAM in virtual machine format, with these components already embedded in the solution. We also offer an advanced hardware solution, called PAM Crypto Appliance, with the following features:

Protection against physical tampering with the device;
Protection of the encryption key in hardware;
Asymmetric key storage;
Embedded HSM;
TPM module; and
Redundant power supply and hard drives.

PAM Crypto Appliance simplifies the solution deployment process and enables one to achieve compliance with security and performance requirements. In one of the senhasegura deployments, while one of our main competitors needs 64 servers, our solution only needs six, reducing the time and complexity of implementation and also PAM costs.

Another factor to be considered when checking PAM costs is the need to hire Professional Services to set, customize, configure, and update a PAM solution, which increases additional costs and can be avoided by opting for senhasegura.

Moreover, with senhasegura, your company spends less on support technologies, since the additional software required is already embedded in the solution.

Finally, it is necessary to calculate operating expenses to predict PAM costs, once again, taking into account the training time of the team and managers, which can be reduced with the use of our tool.

Conclusion

In this article, you saw that:

PAM refers to a set of tools and strategies that ensure cybersecurity;
Its main goal is to guarantee the principle of least privilege, restricting privileged access in IT structures;
This technology allows avoiding and reducing damage caused by the action of hackers and human failures, which compromise the security of privileged credentials;
With PAM, one can avoid major losses generated by data breaches;
To know how much your company will spend with the implementation of this solution, you need to take into account a number of factors that directly impact PAM costs;
We have also shown you the reasons why senhasegura is the PAM solution that has the best cost-benefit ratio for your company.

About senhasegura

We, from senhasegura, are part of the group of information security companies MT4 Tecnologia, founded in 2001. Our goal is to provide digital sovereignty to our customers through the control of privileged actions and data.

Our work includes:

Optimizing the performance of companies, avoiding interruption of operations;
Performing automatic audits on the use of permissions;
Auditing privileged changes to detect abuse of privilege automatically;
Providing advanced solutions with the PAM Security Platform;
Reducing cyber threats; and
Bringing the organizations that hire us into compliance with audit requirements and standards such as PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 27001, and HIPAA.