Ironsphere: Privileged Access Management for Mission Critical System

For most IT applications security is an after-thought or even never-thought. As a result of this, IT professionals and decision makers frequently find themselves in a tough position to make a trade-off between operational efficiency and security. With Ironsphere’s PTA solution in place, once a task is designed or a script is uploaded to Ironsphere, it can be easily delegated to users who can run it on demand, scheduled or recurring, without any interactive access to mission critical systems. Ironsphere ensures that the required level of trust is established before or during a task, with built-in capabilities including managerial approval, multi-factor-authentication, ITSM ticket validation (e.g. ServiceNow) and geo-fencing.

Most task management solutions address the most common repetitive business processes in enterprises, not the credentials those who attack systems value most – those of privileged or “superusers” with the rights to access many systems, usually with full authority. More than 80 percent of breaches are linked to stolen privileged credentials or privilege abuse. Ironsphere offers a solution to this problem.

Could you tell us more about your clientele?

With the world’s most cost-efficient, flexible, and easily-deployable access control software, our technology platform supports many global telecom service providers and large enterprises. We serve a large clientele, from large banks and other financial service firms including insurance companies, communication service providers, and more. Moreover, we partner with cloud and managed network solution providers, with independent software vendors and large systems integrators.

What are some of the benefits these solutions provide?

The primary benefit of PTA is that it automates the system administrators’ tasks. This prevents the need to access the critical infrastructure of the organization. We enable IT managers and network admins to efficiently gain secure access, control configurations, and indisputably record all activities within their enterprise infrastructure. For that reason, we prevent the material impact a breach may have on business operations and continuity. Our task automation suite for staff augmentation and granular access control keeps users isolated from critical systems and infrastructure, and delegates tasks instead of providing access to critical systems. The suite also increases the efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, and enables trust and accountability while working. As the suite unifies visibility of privileged activities and hides enterprise infrastructure topology, it facilitates additional security. Manual errors that result in security gaps or service outages are common in many organizations. We avoid such manual errors and provide a unified visibility of scripts and changes made. The suite also centralizes control of who can run which script, and ensures the required level of trust and accountability while running the same. It is also capable of scheduling tasks and automating repetitive privileged tasks, including IT network operations.

PTA brings significant value to enterprise IT teams with full audit, and compliance as it is more secure, efficient, accurate, and less expensive. The solution makes senior admins more comfortable in delegating complicated multi-step tasks and removes human error by reducing the command execution to a single click. With Ironsphere’s PTA module all tasks can be run under a single privileged account, keeping a full record of the parameters used and the authority of the command chain.

What plans do you envision for the future?

We foresee significant growth in the cybersecurity market as companies go digital. In the days to come, cybersecurity will become mandatory for every organization and we are preparing to capture that opportunity by providing best-of-breed services and solutions.