This summer, I’m traveling with my children and my parents to England – the land of my grandmother’s birth and upbringing. We are planning to see many things while we are there – the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, Buckingham Place, the White Tower, and so much more. In this spirit, I was thinking of all the wonderful castles I’ve seen over the years – while also thinking about how to frame this blog for you - our Server Suite and Cloud Suite customers - about the challenges and limitations you face – and to share a bit about how things are changing for the good! And that’s how I started to ponder … at what point does the protective fortress (of Server PAM) become so difficult to manage, maintain, get supplies into, get communications out of, and control operations from, that it also becomes your prison?
Judging from the top challenges we hear from Server Suite and Cloud Suite customers, we are just about at that tipping point. We know you are getting value and are happy using Server Suite and Cloud Suite – but we’ve also heard you on your top struggles and challenges: Let’s unpack the top two issues that you’ve been sharing – and have a look at some new options to modernize, automate, and improve your fortress. Two of the top topics that pop up repeatedly are:
- Sprawl – of identities and credentials, of the technology ecosystem, of what it takes to manage and maintain solutions
- Lack of visibility and difficulty with auditing - this one explains itself!
Let’s zoom in and consider these issues more.
Sprawl
Challenge: It is becoming harder and harder to tame the chaos around identity security solutions – whether it’s the ever-growing number of identities (human, non-human … agentic – what’s next?) and credentials, the number of systems that need to be supported – including legacy systems, or the sheer effort of managing and maintaining the integrations, the updates, the technology under-the-covers. Identity security teams frequently end up feeling as though they are triaging bits and pieces, instead of being focused on the important work of actual security, cue the whack-a-mole imagery.
What’s new to help: Server Suite and Cloud Suite customers should know that there are new capabilities that have been introduced on the Delinea Platform that can lift some of the burden around trying to control the sprawl, such as:
- Baked-in multi-factor authentication for accessing systems, to streamline the moving parts and reduce complexity
- Native support for MFA providers and other systems enable robust access mechanisms that scale and help remove the silos that you are frequently struggling against
- Policy-based authentication to help provide automation for what used to be time consuming processes, reducing costs and improving outcome
Leveraging new, modern capabilities that help you tame the sprawl and reduce manual efforts will help make your fortress stronger and more efficient – while preventing it from being constricting and ever-more costly. Think of it as more of a renovation instead of a tear and replace.
Lack of visibility and difficulty with auditing for compliance
Challenge: While we’ve come a long way since managing passwords in excel files, there’s continued to be a challenge around gaining visibility into audit-worthy and audit-necessary data, and how to wrangle that data together into a consolidated, auditable report --- and then having to do it all again (and again) for the next audit or audits. Also, it’s costly – and requires a lot of upkeep and maintenance – to keep failover environments ready to backup primary systems. These are common pains and complexities that customers share with us across the Server PAM space.
What’s new to help: Delinea has introduced a new architecture that acts as a centralized hub that is helping customers change the game. Customers can leverage tight integration between Server Suite and the Delinea Platform, while continuing to use existing Server Suite deployments and take advantage of the following benefits:
- Continuous identity discovery can help you locate identities and shadow identities efficiently and on an ongoing basis – without making your team attempt to do the legwork.
- You can capture and store session audit data in the cloud: This means that rather than trying to go out to each system, gather what you need, and bring it all together somewhere, you can retain what you need, see what you have, and create reports quickly and easily.
- Session recording: You can record user actions and store that data in the cloud, too. Admins will be able to review the activities in real-time, look at them after-the-fact, or elect to leverage AI capabilities, which will be able to automate the review and alert based on the review findings.
- Microservices-based environments with built-in HA. The microservices nature of the Delinea Platform enables a robust, scalable, always on HA environment – without all the costs and maintenance that were required before.
Improving visibility and streamlining the audit process are game changers for most organizations. They can liberate you from your castle, and allow you to have the visibility, flexibility, and control to manage the whole kingdom.
I’ve only touched on two major challenges that our Sever PAM customers grapple with – and I’ve also only covered some of the new capabilities that can be used to help. If you are a Server Suite or Cloud Suite customer, and you’d like to learn more about what’s new and how it can help you, please join our Product Management team and technical experts for the customer-only webinar on June 3: Unlock New Advanced Capabilities for Your Server Suite Deployment