ARCON Privileged Access Management Reviews

Primary use is to control Microsoft administrators.

It has improved our government compliance score in terms of audits. Auditors used to ask this basic question: Who has done what? We never had an answer because everyone was logging in using a common ID.

The second improvement is the discipline that has developed in the administrators. They definitely want to do things in the right manner and nobody wants to do anything wrong because the recording is going on and everybody knows that they are being watched.

One important feature is the administrator access, mainly for Windows machines as well as Linux machines. It is important for us because there is accountability associated with each user ID.

And the recordings are also helpful.

There are a few improvements that could be made. One is that it should be browser-agnostic and, frankly, it is working well on Internet Explorer. It should work on popular browsers like Mozilla and Firefox.

Also, I would like to see a "wild card" kind of a feature or something that would enable us to search the video.

Finally, it would be helpful to have a "Favorites" list. For example, if I have 100 servers but I only go to 10 servers frequently, a Favorites list would allow me to go through those 10 servers only.

The product is very stable. We have not faced any issues in terms of stability.

The scalability depends on the internal hardware. The software can handle a number of users and a number of servers. We started with about 100 servers. Now, we are around 900 servers. We have not found any issue in terms of scalability.

We can call them, submit a ticket, they can remote in. I haven't seen any issue with the technical support.

This was the first solution we started using.

The setup is quite simple. The only thing that is complex about the implementation is in terms of culture. Regarding the software setup, there's no problem. It's purely a standard software installation. Nothing outstanding about it.

In terms of quantity, I have not measured the ROI. But in terms of quality, I would put it more in terms of the man-hours my people wasted in complying with whatever requirements there were. With this solution, we have been able to do away with all those man-hours and do things in a very straightforward way. We look at ROI more in terms of the usability and how it makes our life simpler.

I definitely feel the product's pricing is a good value. It is one of the best products we have.

The licensing is server-based.

We had choices other than Arcon and we shortlisted a few products. We had selected a Dell solution, Arcon, and one other product. Then we went to a tendering process to learn about pricing. Ultimately whoever would quote the best price would get the order.

I would advise, during the implementation itself, in the beginning, to start with the 20 servers only. Then test it thoroughly, not as a product but, rather, the implementation methodology. What happened with us, during implementation, was that some users caused some problems. Actually, they weren't problems, rather they were more a user culture change, and how integration would happen with the SIM.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. It's a good product to have but it's not a 10 because most of the features don't get implemented. It would be helpful if they could arrange it so that the customer can implement features. They should conduct meetings and tell the users, as a group, about the features that should be implemented. Also, the customer's information should be available immediately to the support team so that support can be deployed immediately.

We have a team of people who do the administration activity for servers and databases before our kiosk came into the picture. They used to share a common user ID along with the password among each other. Now, after our kiosks came in, they login into our kiosks with their old user ID, enter the ID, and the underlying connection is a common ID, but the password, they do not know.

Initially when we started, the function for automatic password change was not available. Also, Windows-based logins were not available. These two features came in later on about four to five years back. These functions have helped improve the product within our organization.

Once logged into our kiosk, I can go to 10 different servers and everything is logged. We can use this to identify which user is logged in, because the login being using to connect to servers will be a common ID, and that ID will not tell you who is the person logged in is.

With this log available, we can drill down to the activities performed by the people within our kiosk. There is a great feature where in the case of Unix servers, we have our own text-based logs. In the case of Window's server, we cannot create a text-based log, so our kiosk takes the screenshot or picture of the screen when I am working. It does this every three seconds. 

Another feature is the password can be changed automatically. For example, if you have a 60 day password change policy, your cards will change the password on its own and keep it within the system.

The auto-password change feature which was recently added. It is supposed to change the password. However, in some cases, while changing the password, it has caused me to lose to connection due to network-related issues or something similar. What we need to have is a type of log for failure of password change. We would like to have something that somebody can act upon, then rectified the problem.

We have not had any issues in the last eight to 10 years. When we were just implementing or just after implementation for six months or so, there were some stabilization issues, but those were immediately resolved.

Our kiosk structure is a very good structure. It will just connect to a server and show you the screen. 

They have very good support. They provide 24/7 support, because we do critical things, and also we work 24/7. Therefore, if an issue comes up, we require support, and they fix it.

There was a previous solution, but it was not writing in the logs properly. It was writing the logs only for the Unix-based system, which is text-based. Those logs were available. However, Windows and other systems were not available in that previous system.

The initial setup was very simple. There was only one server we had to setup. We needed to store all the passwords, and a secure database is used. There is a product center, so if production goes down, it will immediately switch, and our work will continue as is. 

The initial set up of the Client installation on each and every server. This is a slightly critical thing, but we had to make sure everything was perfectly installed.

Implementation went very smoothly because you are just changing the password on the back-end and handing it over to our kiosk, which will take care of it.

There are no major concerns with licensing because we can handle multiple servers in our kiosk system. 

This was over 18 years ago. We looked an IBM and CA product (something with single sign-on).

The first time, we manually updated the password. Afterwards, it changed on its own automatically.

For our requirements, this is the best product out there.

It was much more challenging to support Arabic language and some legacy IE9 supported applications integration. But Professional Services solved the issues very well.

Session recording, as it covers compliance and it also covers our in-house applications.

It should support the SQL Always On platform with FQDN name instead of IP, so where all the databases are managed centrally.

In our company, we are not managing single-single SQL Servers, we are putting in a technology called Always On, where all the databases are managed centrally.

Whatever solutions or tools we have, we need one SQL instance or something that we can provide from that Always On system so that way, from the database side, there is high availability, it is in two or three different physical locations. If tomorrow something bad were to happen, and your main site was down, you wouldn't need to worry because all the same data would be available on the other site.

For this database, ARCON first said, "We do support Always On." Then we started migrating this database to the Always On database and slowly we came to see that they have two different databases, which are keeping recording logs or something - the sessions become very high. As soon as it is replicating, it is not shrinking the database. They told us, "Okay, keep our database separate from your Always On. Give us a standalone." 

So the reason that's not going to benefit our organization is because, single-handed, we were managing from one platform. Now we have to manage two, three, four, five different, single-single, standalone databases, which will create more overhead for our admin staff.

One time, due to database connectivity issues.

Not yet, although a couple of our requirements were solved with the next patch release.

Five out of five. No doubt they are good.

We did not have a previous solution. We evaluated some solutions and then started using ARCON. We found the potential was there in ARCON because it was supporting the applications which are only OS-based. That means, if you have Linux OS or Windows OS, it is supporting you. But from the application point of view, no one was supporting it, so that was a plus-point which contributed to ARCON being selected.

Initially, there were some issues with .NET applications in Windows 10 systems, but with the help of our internal IT support we overcame the issues.

Pricing is low and licensing is flexible.

We evaluated TPAM, Centrify, CA, CyberArk and InspectView and, of course, ARCON. 

There were a couple of other products which were causing us pain points, like Tripwire IP360. Then Tripwire, they also have something called CCM, Configuration Compliance Manager.

Definitely go for user training before full deployment.

We use it to access all the servers.

From the administrative point of view, there are cases that I have automated. I used to have to log in to all the servers. Now, it's really simple to work.

For compliance, each change I do, in each of the servers, is clearly recorded. We recently faced an audit and this was an awesome feature. Even our auditor had praise for it saying, "This is really a good feature."

In terms of automation, there are a number of cases, ARCON-related, where we are automating. It could be user-creation or services-creation inside ARCON. There are wonderful features which have really helped me a lot to automate things.

Also, a helpful feature from the compliance perspective is the reporting. Suppose there is one server and I want to know what are all the types of access to it. Suppose there are some 10 users who are using that server. I can easily fetch a report showing, for example, that there are two users who have server admin access; there are three users who have read-only access; there are five users who have prompt-access.

The connectivity of the user interface is really awesome. It is segregated properly. I don't know exactly how ARCON looks out of the box but ours has a little bit of customization. The user interface, overall, is really good. If I have some 20 servers in my ID, I can easily see for which servers I have read-only access, for which servers I have prompt-access, and for which servers I have server admin access. 

There are no APIs readily available. There are hundreds of products available on the market. It could be many applications, not just the server gateway. For many applications, by default, we will get the API. Let's say I'm trying to integrate "XYZ" application with another application. When we do that, usually, we look for APIs. But ARCON does not have the APIs readily available. Having that, for a complete end-to-end solution, would really help. 

As I mentioned, I'm working on automation for ARCON so that whatever the ARCON administrator is doing will be automated, rather than having to do it manually. For that, I had to spend months to get the API developed myself. Having that handy out of the box, that would really help, because what I am doing is not limited or restricted to the three or four cases. I'm going to automate the complete end-to-end solution of ARCON administration in our organization. So having an API would really help me.

Performance-wise, we recently upgraded. Since that upgrade, the performance has been really good. Now, I truly don't see any issues. So far so good.

There were some small glitches earlier but they have been sorted out now. There was a little bit of slowness where, when I was trying to log in to a server it used to keep saying, "loading, loading," but that has been resolved. There was another issue where I would log in to a server, but the moment I logged in, I would get disconnected. That has also been resolved. There was one more issue where, when I tried to log in to a server and key in the credentials, the credentials were not entered into ARCON. And then, due to the multiple attempts, the ID would become blocked. But that has also been sorted.

The product team, the support team is readily available, 24/7. We have direct contact. If there are any issues, I get direct support. I don't see any issue there. Overall, the tech support is very good. They are very supportive, and we are getting immediate support.

I don't recall the name of the product, but we switched because of a lot of performance issues. With that product, we used to get a lot of customer complaints as well as user complaints saying that they would be in the middle of some production activity and the performance would be very slow, causing the production activity to be delayed.

I cannot comment on the initial setup because it was done by our system admin team along with support from the ARCON team. 

We recently upgraded. There were no issues during that implementation. Our own support team was readily available, on-site, to implement it.

Although I'm not involved with this side of it, I assume pricing would have been reasonable, that is why we went for it. I would say definitely say it gives value for the money.

It has really helped us a lot. It's a wonderful platform.

We're using it for managing the access to our devices; privileged administrative access to the devices is handled through ARCON.

Previously, we had to go through some effort to change the credentials of our devices. The process was subject to human error. For example, if someone missed the schedule, the password would not be changed. For things like managing credentials, some kind of register had to be maintained.

With the Password Vault of ARCON, all these processes are automated. The credentials are changed, as per the schedule. The information is encrypted, kept in our vault, and sent to all the email addresses within the ARCON solution itself.

It has helped us in automating all the work we do. For instance, it helps us in forensic analysis. It helps us find out who has done what; what was done by the user. Also, managing the accounts on the devices has become easier.

The most valuable features are the password management and the logs that are captured. We use both extensively.

Currently, we can manage only the SSH or RDP connections, but there are many more devices that are present, apart from our SSH and RDP. We want all this to be part of the ARCON solution. For the password management, they should increase the pool of supported devices, they should have more connectors.

They have to work on their tech support. 

In addition, they have to consider that upgrades should be easy for the administrators. Currently, along with the upgrade of the ARCON solution, we have to consider the desktops and the endpoints from where the solution will have to be accessed. We have to upgrade those endpoints and desktops as well. So upgrades are not smooth.

They also have to work on a cloud solution, because most things are going towards the cloud. A cloud integration should be considered in ARCON. We have not seen one up until now.

We have not encountered any major problems with the product. We are able to use it without any problem.

We haven't had any scalability issues.

They need to improve on technical support, because ARCON has become a critical application. They should provide 24-hour support. But we've observed, in many scenarios, we don't get the support we need until the managers are involved. So they have to improve on the tech support.

We started with ARCON because a few of our projects were using it and, when we were thinking in the direction of adopting a PAM solution, we got recommendations from the projects that we should consider it.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had a team that helped us in deploying the solution. While deploying the solution, they planned the architecture and the information they would be needing. They provided that to us beforehand and, post-deployment, they arranged training for the team on two occasions.

The product's pricing is a good value. It's appropriately priced. The product has all the required features. It doesn't work in some of the areas but, overall, it's pretty good.

We considered CyberArk and CA PAM.

My advice would depend on how your administrators are placed, because it depends a lot on the desktop that they're using. It has dependencies on the .NET framework the ActiveX version. So, if you have a uniform environment, and it's very easy to upgrade the endpoints, then ARCON could be considered. Because, for any upgrade of the ARCON solution, an upgrade of the endpoints is required, for the desktops. It's from there that the administrator will be accessing the ARCON solution. It is a little complex. But if you have a uniform environment, you should consider ARCON.

It has all the capabilities and the customization is easy, but there are the problems with tech support and upgrading the solution which has a lot of dependencies. Because of those dependencies, we cannot consider deploying the upgrade quickly.

It has positive and negative points.

The primary use case is we want to control the access of the administrator. 

We have a lot of the administrators in our organization who have privileged access on the infrastructure, devices, servers, and network devices. We want to control this access, and at the same time, monitor this access. We use it to control privileged access of administrators on infrastructure and security devices, then monitor them from time to time.

It gives us a lot of control functions, which we were lacking in our organization. The privileged users, who are mostly administrators, are configured on the endpoints. We were not previously able to monitor, review, or control this. Therefore, it gives us a lot of comfort in terms of security level. Now, our infrastructure devices and servers are secured and nobody can have unauthorized access to them. Only the authorized users, whom we provide and approve access during any point of time, can access critical devices and mission critical systems. This is the benefit that we receive from this tool.

The best part of this product is the administrator convenience. The portal is very user-friendly. An administrator can use it very easily. This is the most important part of any privileged or anti-management solution. If it is not user-friendly an administrator will not want to use it. It has to be very user friendly and easy to use. 

What is a good feature here, just insert whatever target that you want access, then click next, and you will be in the system. I would suggest this should be the most prominent feature for any of the privileged or anti-management system.

What I like on this product: It is very easy, user-friendly, and an administrator can access it at any point in time without any hassle.

This product is lacking in terms of dashboarding analytics and should have user behavior analytics. It should also have better dashboarding for executive management and security managers, which this product is missing. 

Another important feature where this product is lacking, in terms of the managing the accounts, is in the active directory (provisioning and non-provisioning), or bridging it with the active directory. Thus, it needs anti-bridging.

ARCON needs three important things:

• The user behavior analytics should be there. 
• The dashboarding should be improved.
• Anti-bridging should be built into product.

This would make the product a comprehensive privileged R&D product.

In the future, I would like to have a type of functionality for the product with the mobile application. This would be helpful for some of our approvers, so they can approve at any point of time, sitting anywhere in the world when requests come in through the mobile application. Using the app, they can upload requests of the administrator or users. We would like to see this type functionality go on the product roadmap.

This product's performance is good, especially in terms of user access and approval metrics.

We have never faced any issues with scalability. This product is scalable enough. There are:

• Any number of services that you can add.
• Any number of users who can use it.
• Any number of infrastructure devices which can be added.
  

There are no issues in terms of support for this product.

Whenever we have had an issue, we raise a tech support ticket and immediately their tech support engineers come on a call. They do their best to try to resolve the issue. If they fail, sometimes to resolve the issue, then they work with their product team and come up with a solution immediately. The technical staff are good, and they are not facing hard issues in terms of support, because their technical skills are quite good.

We were not using another solution prior to ARCON.

It is not complicated; a very straightforward setup. Whenever they have to upgrade it, it is a 10 minute job. They upgrade the entire thing at one time. We have a two-tier architecture with a Gateway and a back-end application. Everything is deployed on the application, and the Gateway is only to connect to the end system. 

It is not multiple servers. It is not jump server technology. It is a very easy setup. You can have two servers and run it at any point of time.

The implementation is very simple. Whenever we have faced any issues, the vendor team can easily come and troubleshoot it, because of the simple setup which they have.

It is good value for our business. According to me, their competitors are more costly. Therefore, it is quite affordable. I find the ARCON to be much cheaper than the other products in the market.

Their licensing model is very simple, as it is based on the number of endpoints which you want to manage along with the number of users and administrators which you want to use. In terms of licensing, they are very flexible, because it is not a hard license. The licensing is simple, and there are only two types licensing: device licensing and user-based licensing.

We evaluated many other solutions along with the ARCON. We identified this solution as the best in terms of its accessibility. That is a main point. If an administrator can accept this, and it is very easy to use, it will be a successful product. 

We evaluated other products in the market, besides CyberArk. Ultimately, we decided to stick with this product. The cost is also a technical factor apart from the user convenience, which was the prime factor along with user acceptability. These were the two factors that we considered. Then we went ahead with ARCON.

While I have seen other products, and they are very good with dashboarding, reporting, etc. However, the analytics are so complex that the user is not able to use the product. There is a restriction in connection and containerization. You cannot take sessions, because others have taken sessions. Those are the constraints and challenges with other tools. 

Those challenges were there with the other tools, which I do not find in this tool. This tool is very simple and straightforward. If you have access, you can access the end system. From the moment our administrator accepted this tool, we did the PoC for this tool and they liked it.

The product is really a good product and a good value for the money, in terms of costs, user convenience, and functionality that they offer. It is a comprehensive, apart from a few things. The dashboarding and analytics are not very good, so they have to work on these two parts. Apart from those, they should have an anti-bridging functionality too. They are lacking only with these few things. I am sure they will be working on these points very soon, and they will be add to the roadmap to bridge the gap.

If any customer is looking for this product, and comparing it with another product in the market, I would suggest that they do a proper PoC. Do not go with marketing and branding terms. They should do proper business cases and give it to their administrators, then ask them to use it for at least a week or 10 days time. Afterwards, they should decide whether they want to ahead with this product or another product in the market.

The primary use of the solution is to give privileged access to critical resources, including monitoring and auditability.

Whatever my scope was, it was covered by the application.

I recently was having an issue with the Office 365 web browser. Therefore, I reported this problem to the ARCON team, and they brought in developers. They made it compatible with the new browser station of Office 365. 

The locks, which can be features. You can group various departments to obtain the approval records for workflows. Therefore, it creates a type of automation, and I do not have to manually do everything or configure things.

Video and audio logs are there for any activities that the privileged admin carries out.

For the in-house built applications, they need to provide good, solid access through their portal.

It has been very stable. I have not had an issue with this product.

It is a scalable product.

A year ago, our infrastructure was on-premise. Then, we moved to the cloud infrastructure. Even during that time, it was very easy for us to move this application and database from on-premise to cloud, as well as configure new things, such as load balancing. The product is very compatible.

When we transitioned from our on-premise to the cloud environment, and even during the transition period, we did not face any challenges or any problems with this product. There was just minor tweaking that we had to do with the new features on the cloud, like failover, as well as autoscaling.

Tech support is quite good. They have been right there to help me out. 

Their support details are good. 

We did not use a previous access management tool. This product seems to appropriately meet our scope financially, as well as technically, which is why we went for it.

Implementation was very straightforward. 

Implementation may take about half a day, then you have to create your environment. However, this depends upon how many resources that you need to configure through it. If you want to give access and resources to people, then you should have a clear plan for your implementation. For example, which groups should you give access to. These things take about half a day to implement. Then, configuration is about a day. 

Product pricing is based on users and connections. We did not have to pay more for additional features.

They do have some licenses, which are required for things like Linux servers. However, in my environment, we do not have Linux servers. 

We also evaluated Densify.

I am satisfied with the application. The scope and specs that we had are met by this product. It is a very good product which is scalable. 

Controlling the privileged access to all the target servers.

Provisioning of all administrative access through this solution. The privileged administrators are logging in to the solution using their domain ID and then getting access to the required servers based on their credentials. The administrators do not need to know the actual administrator's password. Otherwise, in an environment if you have N of servers, the administrator needs to know the ID password of each and every server. After implementation of this solution they are all stored in the password vault of this solution.

So in this case, let's say one administrator is managing a hundred servers. He may not know the different passwords of the different servers. That person will log in to this solution using his domain ID and password and he will get access to the servers he is managing. This is a primary use of this particular solution.

And then, after storing this administrator password in this password vault of the solution, the solution can automatically go and change the password based on the defined frequency with the defined complexity.

Additionally, it is recording video records for Windows and command-line reports for others, Linux and AIX, of whatever activities being carries by that particular administrator.

One thing which needs improvement is where it is keeping video logs of Windows Servers, whatever activities are being carried out by the administrator. Because Windows logs are a video, they are unsearchable, so if you need to search for a specific administrator and what he has done on a server, right now you need to go through different video logs of that particular timeframe. I think they are coming up with an additional feature where in it can be indexed and can be searchable.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We have designed a solution such that it has been implemented in both the production as well as the DR environments. Whenever we wanted to upgrade the product to the next version, we upgrade the DR first, then production. And whenever production is being upgraded, the entire access is switched over to DR for all the users. So effectively there is no down time for the end users, the administrators.

The stability of the product becomes very important. Otherwise, if the server in the solution is down, all the administrators lose their access for administration. It has proved its stability over the last five to six years.

We never had scalability issues. The primary issue will be storing the logs. The storage is attached to the SAN, so whenever there is a space crunch, in terms of storing the logs, we just increase the SAN storage. That's it. In terms of computer requirements, we never had an issue in terms of performance.

We had a little different model altogether. We had their resource on site for our support. We used to talk to the onsite person only. So I wouldn't be a right person to give you feed back on the tech support, as such. But whenever we had to escalate to tech support, there was a good response.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup is pretty straightforward, it is normal. There is application server, there's a gateway server and there's a database server. I don't think there is any complexity in that. 

The product's pricing is good value.

In terms of licensing, go for user-based licensing, without any limit on the target servers.

We evaluated different solutions. We evaluated CyberArk and, if I remember correctly, we had evaluated one more Indian product. I don't recollect its name.

Primarily we took the decision to go ahead with ARCON because the criteria for privileged administrative environment as a domain was evolving a lot at that time. It was in 2012. We felt that they offered many customizations, anything which was required that was specific to the customer's environment. They offered that customization to us. And they have come up with a number of customizations, and a number of good features over that period of time. With CyberArk, we didn't have that much flexibility in terms of customizing the product.

Obviously your administrators should participate in the decision to buy this product, because they will have to go through the solution to access any server or any device on which they wish to do administration. At times, initially, it may seem to people who are doing administration that their flexibility is removed. You have to make them aware that the solution brings them flexibility in terms of not remembering the passwords of many servers; when they have a number of servers to be administered, they write down the passwords. Those issues are taken away.

It also provides a lot of security to the administrator himself. He can also review what commands fired, what commands did not fire.

The solution was suited for the purpose when we evaluated it, and it has also evolved to meet the different needs, additional needs. I think it's continuing to evolve.