In light of disastrous breaches where threat actors successfully stole sensitive user credentials from traditional password managers, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are asking their Managed Service Providers (MSPs) how they are protecting key client accounts and data.

It’s clear that while password managers are important for storing and sharing passwords internally and externally, they are not equipped to protect SMBs from sophisticated cyber threats, and lack the functionality to enable MSPs to easily protect and manage the various accounts involved in an SMB’s day-to-day workflow.

The answer? MSPs need a security-first partner and platform that integrates across their technology stack to automate help desk technician workflows and streamline the management of privileged, local, and service accounts.

Where Password Managers Fall Short

Although traditional password managers allow businesses to store and share passwords internally or externally with clients, they lack several of the security measures necessary to follow best practices

For example, password manager applications don’t support regular password rotations for privileged accounts, forcing MSP technicians to go directly to Microsoft 365, Active Directory, or Azure AD to manually update credentials, which can become time consuming and difficult as MSPs continue to scale their operations. And as an MSP grows, the number of endpoints with local admin and service accounts to manage will only continue to grow.

MSPs need security automation solutions to help their teams scale with their customers as they continue to grow. That’s why CyberQP Cybersecurity is developing security automation to accelerate MSP operations, including a Privileged Access Management solution that eliminates manual management for MSPs.

What is Privileged Access Management?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools offer a set of tools and best practices to safeguard privileged accounts, whether they are local admin accounts across a client’s endpoints or Azure AD/Office 365 tenant admins. In colloquial terms, PAM solutions protect your MSP’s metaphorical keys to the kingdom.

Privileged Access Management enables MSPs to discover, monitor, and manage these privileged accounts using a variety of capabilities including:

• Automated rotation of privileged credentials to reduce the potential for threat actors to compromise privileged accounts.
• Temporary privilege escalation to minimize the number of people with access to sensitive information and deter insider threats.
• Privileged account discovery to identify potential blind spots and align all of your end users’ privileged accounts to your MSP’s best practices.
• The ability to sync credentials back to a secure password vault if an MSP needs a secure place to store and manage passwords.
• Create Just in Time (JIT) access to minimize the standing privilege and risk associated with technicians having 24/7 access to privileged accounts.

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What MSPs Need in a PAM Partner

In order to address the growing concerns surrounding threat actors targeting MSPs and SMBs alike through these attack vectors, MSPs need a dedicated cybersecurity partner to enable their technicians’ processes.

The right partner will support MSPs with a suite of Privileged Access Management products, including one dashboard that makes it easy to secure your privileged accounts, from your Azure AD (O365), to your end users’ local admin and service accounts. This cybersecurity partner should offer compatibility and API integrations across your technology stack to automatically rotate critical passwords on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and write them back to a documentation tool like IT Glue or Hudu as needed.

A cybersecurity partner should also offer MSPs the ability to randomly generate 99 character passwords or easy-to-read passphrases that can be stored in a secure password manager built for MSPs to give your team peace-of-mind using automated solutions that eliminate hours of manual labor from your technician workflows.

Why MSPs Need Privileged Access Management

There has never been a better time for MSPs to partner with a cybersecurity company to address these cyber criminals. While Privileged Access Management is uniquely positioned to deter threat actors targeting a business’ critical infrastructure, cybersecurity insurance firms are also driving adoption of PAM solutions.

The escalating number of emerging cyber threats and data breaches have caused cyber insurance premiums to spike, and getting coverage has become restrictively expensive for MSPs, if they can get coverage at all.

As more insurance providers begin requiring Privileged Access Management solutions and requiring regular password rotations, MSPs may need to get onboard to avoid impacting their level of coverage, their premium costs, and their eligibility for cyber insurance in the future.

A Privileged Access Management Cybersecurity Partner for MSPs

Many Privileged Access Management providers are designed to support enterprise security teams, and not equipped to support MSPs. At CyberQP Cybersecurity, we’re building Privileged Access Management and security automation solutions purpose built for MSPs.