Heimdal Privileged Access Management

Overview

Heimdal Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a comprehensive privileged access management platform designed to enable businesses to control, monitor, and secure all access to their most critical and sensitive systems. Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, Heimdal offers their PAM solution as a module within their wider cybersecurity platform, which enables organizations to deploy and manage email, endpoint, patch and asset management, remote desktop, and threat prevention tools via one unified interface.

Key Features

User-Level Access Controls

When a standard user requires admin rights, an administrator can allow or deny their request from the management dashboard and enable token elevation to allow that user to run with admin privileges or run an administrator session. When elevating via Azure, admins can also implement multi-factor authentication for privileged sessions. Requests for privileged access are also sent to admins via email alert, which details who the user is, what rights they requested, and the reason they gave for the request.

As well as elevating privileges for individual users, Heimdal PAM offers the option for group privilege elevation. The platform takes a snapshot of each group before and after all privileged sessions and compares them to ensure no backdoor admin accounts have been created. Finally, admins can set an availability time for privileged access requests, revoke existing local admin rights, and terminate all visible and background actions and processes started in a privileged session when the session ends.

Process-Level Access Controls

Using Heimdal PAM’s application control rules, admins can block the download or running of all executables within a privileged session. They can also configure auto-elevation specific to individual processes. This means that users don’t experience an interaction during which they must request access rights.

This is particularly useful for developers who may need admin rights frequently, as it would save a lot of time to grant them automatically, rather than processing each request manually.

Session Monitoring And Auditing

Heimdal PAM offers a full audit trail of each privileged session and detailed reports into privileged activity, which admins can access via the management dashboard. These reports include information on which users and/or files were escalated, who granted the elevated privileges to that user, and what actions were carried out during the session. Admins can also access higher-level reports into privileged account use, such as average escalation duration.

Proactive Threat Remediation

Heimdal PAM automatically ends a privileged session when a threat is detected on the user’s device, helping to prevent the spread of malware through high-tier systems.

Effectiveness

Heimdal PAM offers granular user and user group access escalation controls, as well as process-level access controls, both of which make it straightforward for admins to grant and remove elevated privileges.

The platform’s session auditing and reporting functionality are strong and easy to navigate via the management console. Reports are data-rich and visual, and can be exported as a CSV file for sharing.

Overall, Heimdal PAM is a highly effective privileged access management solution; it enables admins to easily control privilege elevation to help prevent breaches involving the user of privileged credentials, and it provides robust reporting functionality to help prove compliance with data protection standards such as NIST AC-5 and NIST AC-1,6.

Ease of Management

All of Heimdal’s security products are delivered via a single cloud-based platform and agent, enabling businesses to replace multiple siloed solutions to reduce the overhead and friction generated through managing multiple disparate systems.

While this enables a comprehensive, unified view of security, some of the other tools offered within the holistic platform can be complex to deploy and correctly configure.

As a standalone solution, however, Heimdal PAM is very easy to use. The platform’s management console is easy to navigate, and the lightweight interface is highly intuitive. The management console is also desktop- and mobile-friendly, making it easy for admins to monitor and control privileged access from the office or on-the-go.

Best Suited For

Heimdal PAM is currently compatible with all Windows and MacOS devices.

The solution’s delivery as a module within the wider Heimdal security platform enables it to integrate seamlessly with Heimdal’s Endpoint Detection, Patch and Asset Management, Email Protection, Remote Desktop, Threat Prevention, and Managed SOC products. This means that admins can manage a large portion of their threat landscape via a single dashboard.

The unified approach to security offered by Heimdal PAM makes it a strong solution for SMBs and mid-size enterprises that are struggling to manage multiple disparate tools, and are looking for a user-friendly, easy-to-manage solution.

If organizations are looking to implement Heimdal PAM as part of Heimdal’s wider security platform, rather than as a standalone solution, they should consider that some of the other tools require more complex configuration. However, as a standalone solution, Heimdal PAM is straightforward to deploy, configure, and manage.

Final Verdict

Heimdal PAM is a comprehensive, user-friendly privileged access management platform that enables organizations to gain complete control over access to sensitive, high-tier corporate systems. Long-term management of the platform is straightforward, supported by Heimdal’s intuitive and easily navigable interface.

Overall, we recommend that SMBs and mid-sized enterprises looking for an easy to manage PAM solution with granular access policy controls and detailed audit trails consider investing in Heimdal PAM—particularly those looking to move away from using disparate tools, and consolidate their security stack.