Speaking with Infosecurity at Gartner's Business Process Management Summit in London last week, Bosnian said that version 6.0 of PIMS will be a major step forward for Cyber-Ark, focusing on a privilege user account control.
"We have just started a publicity campaign centering on `got privilege' in the US which seeks to explain about the need to protect user accounts – and their privilege capabilities – in a corporate setting", he said.
"We are seeing a lot of interest in privilege user management amongst our major customers. Privilege users often have multiple contacts in their accounts and this can pose a potentially serious security risk to an organisation if a high privilege account is compromised", he added.
According to Bosnian, the problem of securing privileged accounts within a corporate environment is a potentially major one, as it requires a "top down" approach to IT security.
It's against this backdrop that Cyber-Ark, he said, announced some extra functionality with its PIMS software last November, and v6.0 is the fruition of that announcement.
The plan with PIMS 6.0 is that it will allow the company to become the first IT security vendor to provide a unified, policy-driven approach for shared-account/software-account password management (SAPM) and super-user privilege management (SUPM).
Features of the expanded suite include an automatic privileged account detection capability which, by using distributed architecture, allows companies to adhere to relevant audit and compliance legislation such as PCI DSS and Sarbanes Oxley.
Bosnian says that security gaps in current standalone SUPM solutions are due in part to the struggle with silo-ed Unix security solutions that only address granular access privileges of super-user accounts at the point of usage.
These siloed solutions simply address a portion of the security and compliance challenges that organisations face around super-user accounts.
These challenges include the management of the super-user account itself and the underlying credentials, as well as the need for centralised management, control and auditing on these accounts.
It's against this backdrop that PIMS 6.0 will remove the need for separate SUPM and SAPM implementations, so giving companies a central point of control – and a single user interface for enforcement of common policies across all shared and super-user accounts, as well as their associated activities.
Key features of PIMS 6.0, says Bosnian, will include granular super-user access controls, as well as intelligent privileged account detection.
This latter facility is billed as lowering implementation costs, as well as reducing the overhead required to add in new users and systems as they are commissioned.