Principle of Least Privilege with Your Managed IT Support Services

PoLP is considered a best practice in cybersecurity and can prevent attacks, minimize the impact of breaches, reduce malware propagation and infection, and more. It is often considered a critical step for protecting businesses' high-value assets and data (I.e., customer or employee records). Your company's managed IT support services can help you create a strategy to efficiently enforce the principle of least privilege within your business. The key is to strike a balance between managing and securing privileged credentials while maintaining the operational, end-user needs, and upholding your compliance and cybersecurity requirements.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_cta h2="" css=".vc_custom_1618516443605"]THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST PRIVILEGE (PoLP) is an information security concept where any process, program, or user is only given minimum access, permissions, or privileges needed to perform a function.[/vc_cta][vc_column_text]

When your managed IT support service implements PoLP, you’ll have the ability to assign privileges determined by role-based attributes such as the business unit, time of day, seniority, and other special circumstances. Here are a few examples of role-based privileges.

LEAST-PRIVILEGED USER ACCOUNT – These accounts are designed for the standard user and would allow them to operate with a limited set of privileges. This is the type of account that the majority of your users would be operating under.

SUPER USER ACCOUNT- This type of account would be used for admin roles and specialized IT users. This type of account would generally have unlimited privileges including the ability to read, write, and execute privileges, and the permission to execute systemic changes in your IT network.

GUEST USER ACCOUNT – These accounts are typically created for specific, often temporary, situations and usually have the least number of privileges, even lower than the least privileged user accounts.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

The Vectra 2020 Attacker Behavior Industry Report notes that privileged access is something that many hackers use to leverage lateral movement in cyberattacks. A hacker could use these high-level privileges to gain access to the most critical assets of your business.

With PoLP implemented, this cybersecurity strategy will restrict unauthorized access to data from different levels within your IT environment. When your managed IT support service puts PoLP strategy into place you’ll be able to grant or restrict specific levels of permission and access to users, systems, applications, networks, databases, and so on.