Next-Gen Privileged Access
Management for State, Local andHigher Education Organizations

PubSec - PAM for SLEDA global survey of IT professionals found that 87% of respondents would prefer a “pared down” form of
Privileged Access Management (PAM) that is easier to use than traditional PAM solutions. This is especiallytrue for public sector agencies and organizations with limited cybersecurity budgets.
KeeperPAM addresses the key pain points and requirements for Identity, Credential and Access
Management (ICAM) in government organizations to prevent data breaches without the complexity or
cost of legacy PAM solutions.

Privileged Access Management (PAM)
solutions have historically been used by IT andsoftware development teams to strictly control
access permissions within an organization’s
IT environment. Privileged accounts are aprime target for cybercriminals because theyhold sensitive information, such as customer
and employee data, that criminals can sellon the dark web. Additionally, if a privileged
account is breached, attackers can potentiallyshut down critical systems and perform othermalicious activities.
PAM solutions are designed to protectorganizations from a variety of threats thattarget privileged accounts, credentials andaccess. Traditional PAM products, however,are expensive, difficult to deploy, difficult touse and do not monitor and protect every
user on every device. Luckily, Next-gen PAM
solutions have evolved to provide an easyto-deploy and easy-to-integrate alternative.
These new solutions are used by both IT
departments and other functional groups inan organization to protect access to sensitive
data and files, such as HR, accounting andfinance teams.

© 2024 Keeper Security, Inc.

2PubSec - PAM for SLEDWho Are Privileged Users?
Privileged users within your organization are simply individuals
who have elevated access to sensitive data or systems. Thinkof IT administrators, for example. They can “log in” to several
highly sensitive applications, systems and databases at mostorganizations. Because of their access, these employees areprime targets for cybercriminals who seek to compromise user
accounts to deploy ransomware, extract data or perform othermalicious actions. In order to mitigate the risk of a data breach,organizations need to take proactive steps to identify, manageand secure their privileged users.

What Is a PAM Solution?
Privileged access management, or PAM, systems help
administrators effectively and accurately organize, manage andsecure privileged credentials, so that they can restrict access tocritical systems to only the individuals who need that access toperform their duties. Additionally, PAM solutions secure and store
credentials for both humans and machines (machine credentials
are known as secrets, and are often used by DevOps teams),
manage and monitor sessions, and generate detailed audit andcompliance reports.
However, PAM solutions are not ubiquitous, and even whenorganizations do deploy them, their cost and complexity may
prevent widespread adoption. Traditional PAM solutions are
deployed on-premises, meaning the software and infrastructure
are hosted within an organization’s own data center. Many IT
security professionals have found traditional PAM solutionsdifficult to deploy and hard to integrate with their existing
systems. For example, some vendors use agents for many of
their features or require the installation of many different server
components. This leads to higher costs, as the legacy, on-premsolutions that require multiple infrastructure pieces and extensive
maintenance generally also require professional services
packages from the vendor.

© 2024 Keeper Security, Inc.

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What Is Next-Gen PAM?
Luckily, next generation PAM solutions have emerged as a cost-effective alternative that offer scalability andflexibility. They don’t require infrastructure management or professional services to deploy, allowing administrators
to quickly scale privileged access capabilities. These “next-gen” PAM solutions are fully-managed, easy to deployand require minimal changes to your environment. They can also integrate with your existing tech and Identity
Access Management (IAM) stack.
Modern PAM solutions cover password and secrets management, as well as session management. By combining
passwords and secrets into a single, user-friendly UI, IT admins can easily manage complex policies and create
detailed reporting. With session management, security teams can monitor, record and analyze privileged sessions
without having to onboard any physical assets.

Traditional PAM solutions are cost prohibitive, difficult to deploy and containunused features. KeeperPAMTM addresses the key pain points and requirements inorganizations to prevent data breaches with just the features you need.

Cost Effective

Fast Provisioning

Easy To Use

A single platform withminimal IT staff required
to manage it

Seamlessly deploys andintegrates with any tech or
identity stack in just afew hours

Unified admin console andmodern UI for every employee
on all device types – average
training time is less than 2 hours© 2024 Keeper Security, Inc.

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Understanding the Risk
Cyber threats and ransomware attacks can be
crippling for public sector organizations. The cost ofransomware attacks in government often runs into themillions of dollars, which mostly stems from downtime
and recovery (or in some cases, paying the ransom).
Government agencies and educational institutions
are often targeted in cybercrimes due to the sensitive
information they have access to. Cybercriminals also
know that public sector organizations tend to havesmaller IT teams, budgets and resources to thwart
cyber attacks.
A 2023 report on the state of ransomware notedthat in 2023, the education sector saw the highest
ransomware attack rate of any industry, with 80% ofschools reporting a ransomware attack. Local andstate government agencies are not far behind, with69% reporting a ransomware attack.
Examples of prominent data breaches targetinggovernment organizations are, unfortunately, notdifficult to come by. For example, Clark County School
District in Nevada, the fifth-largest school districtin the United States, experienced a massive data
breach in October of 2023, exposing the sensitive
data of over 200,000 students and staff. According
to a class-action lawsuit, that personal information
includes student and employee records, medical
information, Social Security numbers and healthinsurance information. The hacker group that claimed
responsibility for the attack, SingularlyMD, leveraged
weak passwords — in this case, students’ dates ofbirth — and flimsy Google Workspace file-sharing
practices, to access a multitude of sensitive data.

A 2023 Data Breach Investigations
Report from Verizon Business notesthat 74% of all breaches involve thehuman element, with the majority
due to weak or stolen passwords.

The City of Dallas dealt with a ransomware attack
in May of 2023 and was forced to shut down someof its IT systems, with a number of functional areas
including the police and fire department, experiencing
disruption. The ransomware group Royal gained
access to the city’s network using a stolen domain
service account, and it has been reported that over
26,000 people had their information stolen, includingnames, addresses and medical information.
These examples are not meant to point fingers at
any particular organization. In fact, attacks like thesecan and do happen to public-sector organizationsof all types and sizes on a weekly basis. Instead,these examples are meant to illustrate the need forincreased cybersecurity measures.
Every organization needs to secure its passwords,credentials, secrets and connections to reduce therisk of cyber attacks and defend against internal andexternal threat vectors.

© 2024 Keeper Security, Inc.

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Understanding the Limitations of Legacy PAM Solutions

1. Legacy PAM solutions are deployed on-premises. The complexityand high cost of legacy on-prem PAM solutions create challenges
for IT and security professionals. One key challenge is that 85% oforganizations require a dedicated staff to manage and maintaintheir on-premises PAM solutions– an unjustifiable expense as
budgets tighten in the public sector.

2. L egacy PAM solutions require professional services to configure
and integrate. It can take several months to configure and deploy
a complex, legacy PAM solution. Several traditional PAM solution
providers charge costly implementation fees and “professionalservices,” adding to the cost of an already expensive solution. Adding
integrations, such as identity and access management and Security
Information and Event Management (SIEM), can also add expensive
fees to a deployment.

3. L egacy PAM solutions are designed for engineers and do not work wellfor less-technical employees. In today’s hybrid workplace, the network
perimeter has expanded beyond the office, and the number of devices
and accounts that need to be protected has increased dramatically.
When multiple departments have dozens of systems they regularly log
in to, this results in a sprawl of administrator privilege that is hard totrack and increases the risk of a compromised account. Traditional PAM
solutions are designed for engineers and IT professionals, but generally
do not protect other types of accounts that hold sensitive or confidential
information.

© 2024 Keeper Security, Inc.

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Understanding
Next-Gen PAM

Next generation PAM solutions take a holistic approach to protecting privileged accounts. Rather than having
multiple on-prem solutions from multiple vendors to address password and session management, next-gen
solutions address the core components of PAM within a unified platform that is both cloud based and fully
managed. This includes credential vaulting and access control, secrets management and privileged session
management.

The benefits of simplified, next-gen PAM solutions:	Cloud based. PAM solutions based in the cloud are agentless and clientless, meaning they don’t require1
installing dedicated software agents on individual endpoints. Public sector organizations choose cloudbased PAM for its scalability as well as operational efficiency in reducing maintenance time and cost.
Maintenance for patches, upgrades and the rollout of new features is done by the provider and included inthe cost.

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Protects all users. While PAM focuses on users and accounts that pose a higher security threat anddata breach risk by having privileged access, many of these users and accounts do not reside in the ITdepartment. Next-gen PAM is “PAM for everyone” and is an easy way for employees in HR, legal, finance,accounting and marketing departments to securely share logins to accounts, access secure files, andconfigure access when onboarding or offboarding employees.
 asier to use and deploy. Being agentless, cloud-based PAM solutions are easier to deploy and manage
Eas they don’t require installation on each endpoint. An agentless approach allows for easier scaling andadapting when there are changes to an organization’s IT infrastructure. Initial setup can be done in a day vsmonths for traditional solutions.	Secure and cost-effective. Cloud PAM solutions provide a very secure way to protect passwords,
4 credentials, secrets and connections, especially if the solution utilizes a zero-trust framework andzero-knowledge security architecture. The significantly reduced upfront and operational costs of cloudbased PAM makes it an ideal choice for public sector organizations who do not need an expensive legacy
PAM solution.

A global survey of 400 IT and security executives conducted in January 2023 revealed a desire forsimpler PAM solutions, with 87% of respondents saying they would prefer a “pared down” form of PAM
that is easier to deploy and use than legacy PAM solutions.

© 2024 Keeper Security, Inc.

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KeeperPAMTM for thePublic Sector
Keeper Security Government Cloud (KSGC) Password Managerand Privileged Access Manager is FedRAMP Authorized andStateRAMP Authorized and maintains the Keeper Security zerotrust security framework alongside a zero-knowledge security
architecture, so users have complete knowledge, management
and control over credentials and encryption keys.

 afeguard Against Ransomware Attacks.
S
Mitigate risks that lead to breaches by providing
real-time protection and access to applications,systems, secrets and IT resources.

Save Money and Time with Quick Set-Up.
Easy, fast and affordable to integrate and deploy
for organizations, departments and agencies ofany size with world-class customer support.

Powerful Security Insights.
Provide analytics into credential security andhygiene across all endpoints and systems withnative SIEM integration.

Robust Compliance and Reporting.
Simplify and strengthen auditing and compliancewith support for RBAC, 2FA, FIPS 140-2
encryption, HIPAA, FINRA, SOC, ITAR and more.

Public sector organizations need a way to protect privileged
accounts that is highly secure, easy to deploy and cost effective.
Keeper’s next-gen, zero-trust and zero-knowledge PAM solution
protects organizations of all sizes - from small municipalities andinstitutions to large state agencies and college campuses.

keepersecurity.com | sales@keepersecurity.com© 2022 Keeper Security, Inc.
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© 2024 Keeper Security,8Inc.