CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews

Managing and securing the access to the environment.

I have worked with CyberArk solutions/applications for more than three years.

I have completed several implementations, proofs of concept, operational, and development activities. I have also worked with or checked most CyberArk releases since version 8.7.

Much stricter rotation of credentials.

Unmanaged and highly privileged accounts increase risks that can be exploited. The security controls defined by the organization require protection of the privileged account passwords. CyberArk has helped us to identify, store, protect, and monitor the usage of privileged accounts.

• Controlled access and rotation of credentials.
• The Vault offers great capabilities for structuring and accessing data. 
• Central Password Manager is useful for agentless automated password management through AD integration as well as endpoints for different devices.
• Privileged Session Manager is for provisioning, securing, and recording sessions.

• The product documentation has to be more precise in certain aspects with explanations for functionality limitations along with reference material or screenshots. 
• New functionalities and discovered bugs take longer to patch. We would greatly appreciate quicker development of security patches and bug corrections.
• Online help also needs to be looked into with live agent support.

CyberArk PAS is our go-to solution for securing against the pass the hash attack vector and auditing privileged account usage.

The CyberArk PAS has greatly increased our insight into how privileged accounts are being used and distributed within our footprint.

• Ease of use
• The auditing capabilities
• The great support of their customer success teams

Areas the product could be improved are in some of the reporting capabilities and how the reports are configured.

All features of the CyberArk PAS solution are valuable.

The Digital Vault is one of the key components of the solution along with many other great benefits. The highly secured vault stores the privileged account passwords and data files using encryption. In version v9.7, CyberArk has introduced the Cluster Vault feature, which enhances high availability of the Vault server.

Other important features:

• Automatic password management
• Monitor, record, and control privileged sessions
• Flexible architecture
• Clientless product
• Custom plug-ins for managing privileged accounts and sessions

Unmanaged, highly privileged accounts increase risks that can be exploited by attackers. The security controls defined by the organization require protection of the privileged account passwords. CyberArk helps organizations to identify, store, protect, and monitor the usage of privileged accounts.

An immediate improvement was the implementation of security controls to protect, control and monitor privileged accounts through CyberArk solution.

I have used CyberArk for over two and a half years.

It’s a very stable product. I haven’t encountered any stability issues.

I haven’t encountered any scalability issues. All the components are scalable.

I would give technical support a rating of 4.5/5.

This is the first PAM product that I have used.

The initial installation was straightforward. The configuration or integration can be complex depending on the requirements, design, and infrastructure of the organization.

The pricing and licensing depend on many factors and on the components considered for implementation.

The PAM solution brings cultural change and adds a layer to the way IT administrators access the privileged accounts before implementing the PAM tool. A great, valuable product like CyberArk requires good planning and time to implement all the features.

With the ability to better control access to systems and privileged accounts, we no longer need to manage privilege accounts per user. We are able to manage privilege accounts for the service, which is automatically managed by the CPM as part of the solution. Allowing access to systems by group membership, via safe access, makes controlling actual access much simpler than traditional mapping via the Active Directory.

• The ability to isolate sessions to protect the target system.
• Automates password management to remove the human chain weakness.
• Creates a full audit chain to ensure privilege management is responsibly done
• Creates an environment in which privilege accounts are used, without exposing the password, on target systems.
• Performs privilege functions, without undue exposure, whilst maintaining the ability to audit, where anything suspicious, or unfortunate, may have occurred.

The web interface has come a long way, but the PrivateArk client seems clunky and not intuitive. It could use an update to be brought up to speed with the usability of PVWA.

Whilst the client is completely functional, it's been around for a long time and is reminiscent of XP, or even Windows 95. It could use an aesthetic update, with some of the wording and functions needing to be updated to be more representative of what is found in similar configuration from within the PVWA.

To go into more detail- The old PrivateArk client is simply that, old. Looking at the recently released Cluster Manager quickly reminds us of that. Also, the way in which objects are handled within the old client is similar to how objects were handled in older versions of Windows. The PrivateArk client could do with easier to follow links to configuration items and the ability to perform searches and data relevant tasks in an easier to follow process, there may even be room for inclusion of the server management component (lightweight even) and cluster manager components to be made available via the same client, should permissions permit such. As much as the client remains stable and functional, I believe it is time for an update, even if only aesthetically.

Some improvements could be made to the PSM service. However, this could also be a problem with how Microsoft RDS functions, rather than the PSM services.

This product scales amazingly well.

Technical support works with customers and partners to resolve issues in a timely way.

No previous solutions were used.

The manual reads like a step-by-step guide. The installation, although complex, can be achieved by following the installation guide.

I don’t work with pricing, but licensing is dependent on the needs and requirements of each customer.

We evaluated alternatives, but nothing compares.

Make sure you understand your business objects and your technical objects. Plan to scale out to the entire organization, but start small, and grow organically.

The most valuable feature of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is the vault. I am satisfied with the interface and the documentation.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager could improve the integration with other third-party secret managers, and vault solutions.

I have been working with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for approximately three years. Our clients are typically financial institutions.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is stable.

The scalability of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is good.

Most of our clients are enterprise-sized companies.

I am satisfied with the vendor's support.

Positive

I have used Balabit and One Identity prior to using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. I found that CyberArk has more integration out of the box with other solutions and it solves a lot of problems for customers if they have different solutions.

The initial setup CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is easy.

The price of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager could be less expensive.

My advice to others is this solution can solve a lot of problems.

I rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.

We are using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager because we have too many accounts and we need to manage them.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has helped our organization by controlling users' access.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager could improve the integration docking, it should have more layers. For example, integration with OpenShift.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for approximately two years.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is stable.

We have thousands of users using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager in my organization.

The support from CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is good.

The initial setup of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager was straightforward.

We had a local third-party company help us with the implementation of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. The maintenance is sometimes a challenge for our consulting team that does it.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.

• PAM interface for staff to support customers which may include CyberArk solutions of their own.
• Managing large environments with varied and diverse environments.

Improved our user access and tracking, thereby safeguarding the organization and its customers. Being a user makes us a better reseller.

Shared-service accounts reducing the number of potential entry points as well as the ability to standardise our PAM across a diverse estate.

Multi-tenancy vaults should really have the same release cycle as single tenancy vaults; this will enable us to meet even more customer demand. We are striving to be at least on the latest release minus 1 (n-1) and for us to run both Single and Multi-Tenant core systems the difference in release cycles will result in a wide gap. Considering the considerable changes including user interface we have seen recently, the one concern is that we may end up with users having different interfaces to deal with different customers. 

Very stable with no own goals in three years.

Scalability is very good.

We get excellent feedback from customer service, irrespective of the level of issues raised.

Yes, we decided to change to CyberArk in line with our strategic intent to provide as safe a central and customer environment as possible.

Initial setup was complex and time-consuming but the later versions are a lot faster to implement.

We implemented through in-house specialists.

Standardised offerings that allow for customer-specific flexibility.

We are using this product for our privileged identities and account management. We have some accounts that we consider privileged, the ones that have access to systems, software, tools, and our database and files and folders, etc. We try to maintain these accounts safely and try to grant access to these systems securely. We try and manage other non-human accounts that are DBAs, DB accounts, etc., through CyberArk.

Another initiative for this was the PCA compliance that we wanted to meet.

We don't have many applications in the cloud, we are getting one or two now. So in the future, we plan to utilize CyberArk's secure infrastructure applications running in the cloud. It's on the roadmap. We are utilizing CyberArk's secure application credentials but not endpoints. I have only just learned about the Plugin Generator Utility, so I don't have experience with it yet. It's pretty cool. We intend to use it now.

One way it has improved the organization is we now have restricted access for all users to go through CyberArk. It has also enforced firewall restrictions across other places so they don't go through other means, they go through CyberArk. That brings in compliance and their account is now two-factored, so that is more compliant with PCI regulations.

The way it manages privileged accounts and managed access to privileged systems such that, right now, we are recording every session through PSM and people are more aware that the session is recorded, and they're more careful with what they do.

We are using the VSM proxy solution. That's what we are mainly using. We will try to use the PTA and AIM in the future.

I think it pretty much covers a lot of the privileged identity space, things that other vendors are not thinking about. I think they are doing a very good job. I don't have any suggestions.

We have not had any stability issues so far. We have not had any serious downtime. We do see performance issues with PSM which gets very busy, and we just keep scaling the number of PSMs. When many people log in at the same time, we have some issues with connecting through PSM. We doubled our PSM software and it's better now.

It's pretty scalable. Like I said, we just doubled our servers. If there are more users logging in, we'll probably go for a greater number of servers again.

Technical support is pretty responsive and knowledgeable. We do get the right person.

Others have spoken a lot about security hygiene and I believe that's where you should start.

l would rate CyberArk at nine out of 10. The way for it to get to a 10 is with a lot of features, the amount of cost involved in buying the product, and the PSM proxy issue that we've been facing.

In terms of important criteria when working with a vendor one thing is, as we said, getting to the right person. We go to support only if there is a critical situation where we are not able to solve it. Getting to the right person at the right time, and getting the issues resolved in a timely fashion is what we are looking for.