Review: BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access

Score 4.5

Verdict

BeyondTrust’s Privileged Remote Access is a powerful privileged access management solution that helps provide admins with granular control and visibility into their privileged user accounts and environments. Users praise the product for the value it has provided their organizations since they began using it, as well as its ease of use and integration with third-party tools. Readers should be aware that loading times can be slow for a small number of users. 

Pros

• Granular visibility and control across IT environments
• Cloud and on-premises deployment available
• Easy integrations with existing third-party tools 

Cons

• Some groups of users experience longer loading times than expected
• User interface feels a little outdated

Overview

BeyondTrust is a market-leading privileged access management vendor that offers a range of solutions to help organizations gain granular visibility and control of their environments. Privileged Remote Access is its solution for controlling, managing, and auditing privileged employee, third-party, and vendor remote access, and is designed to support user productivity while providing high levels of security. Using Privileged Remote Access, admins can easily and effectively define which users have which levels of permissions and when, as well as create audit trails, securely inject credentials, and more. This makes the product ideal for zero-trust environments and secure organizations with high volumes of users accessing networks, servers, and work environments remotely. 

Features

Granular Access Control And Permissions

Using Privileged Remote Access, admins can easily configure and enforce policies of least privilege—this means that employees and third-party users are only given the privileges and remote access that they truly need to be able to fulfil their roles. These policies can be assigned to specific vendors, users, groups, and sessions, and include which endpoints can be accessed and under which circumstances. These sessions can then be controlled and monitored via a remote agent, and notifications can be sent to admins when a user accesses the platform. 

Password Vaulting And Credential Injection

The platform also offers the ability to store privileged passwords in its secure, cloud-based, on-appliance vault. Alternatively, the solution can integrate with BeyondTrust’s password and credential management solution (Password Safe), or any other password management solution. This enables users to securely store passwords, as well as inject their credentials directly and safely into live sessions on demand—eliminating the need to not only remember complex passwords, but also shielding credentials from potentially being exposed during manual entry.

Compliance And Auditing

Using the product, admins can easily and effectively produce audit trails, view session forensics, and leverage granular reports into real-time or post-session data. Session logs also keep track of all interactions on an organization’s systems and networks—including which users accessed which endpoints, and their system information. The platform can also produce video recordings of privileged user sessions, to help provide added detail to audit trails.

Admins can also use the product to provide attestation reports to prove compliance with external regulations and laws. 

Ease Of Use

Users praise Privileged Remote Access for how easy the product is to deploy and use, and note that the majority of users are able to connect with the platform without any complexity or frustration on their end. 

What’s also great about the product is that users can easily and efficiently initiate access at any time across a range of platforms—including desktop consoles (Windows, Mac, and Linux), mobile applications (iOS and Android), and web-based consoles.   

The product can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises, making it a flexible solution. But some users do note that if they do need help during deployment, there is a lack of support from BeyondTrust. The product also easily integrates into existing environments—firstly, by integrating with external user directories (such as Active Directory), and secondly, by seamlessly integrating with an organization’s existing solutions (such as password managers, SIEM tools, ITSM systems, and more). 

Pricing

For pricing information, you can contact BeyondTrust’s sales team directly. 

Final Verdict

Privileged Remote Access is an advanced, secure, and easy-to-use solution that enables admins to configure and set granular privileged access policies for users, groups, and sessions across their environments. What sets the product apart is its ease of use across multiple platforms, fuss-free implementation for users, and integrations with a range of existing tools. 

BeyondTrust’s Privileged Remote Access is a great option for larger organizations across all industries that are looking for a powerful product to support their zero-trust environment, as well as to support a large fleet of both internal and external remote users that require access to privileged systems.