Eastern Carver County Schools maintains least privilege principle to secure data of 9,300 students

Challenge

• Eliminate over-provisioned privileged access
  Recent audits and penetration tests revealed significant security gaps, including the ability of Red Teams to repeatedly gain access to critical systems due to excessive and unnecessary privileged access.
• Address lingering privileged accounts that created ongoing risk
  Administrators were using accounts tied directly to high-level privileges, and traditional approaches such as “A” accounts still left privileged credentials active across systems. These accounts were used in places they shouldn’t be, creating avoidable exposure.
• Improve security without adding complexity for a small IT team
  With a limited IT staff, Eastern Carver County Schools needed a solution that would enhance security without requiring a large, complex, or costly project that the team did not have the resources to support.

Netwrix solution

Craig Larsen and team opted for Netwrix Privilege Secure, because it addressed the problem of vulnerable standing privileged accounts. “The concept of temporary elevation, or just-in-time access, make so much sense as the admin is granted access on the fly and access is removed when no longer needed. On top of this, you also have the RDP proxy and included the monitoring and logging,” said Craig Larsen.

• Just in time access. Craig was able to eliminate the abundance of privileged accounts, and instead grant access on the fly with the use of temporary accounts, which are removed once the task is complete, therefore improving the security of privileged activity.
• Leverage existing access manager. The team integrated Netwrix Privilege Secure with their current access manager to reduce the risk of privileged credentials being compromised or misused, which also enabled the rest of the employees to work with the software they got used to.
• Simplify compliance audits. Having implemented the new workflow, the team has met the requirements of the external auditors. Now they are able to prove that they know about all the admin, service and other privileged accounts in their IT ecosystem at any given moment, and that there are no outstanding privileges.
• Get faster time to value. Unlike traditional PAM solutions, Netwrix Privilege Secure was easy to deploy and implement, which was ideal due to the limited IT resources. Craig commented: “Honestly, Netwrix Privilege Secure is so simple to install and get running that we probably could have done it ourselves.”
• Enforce least privilege policy. Moving forward the team has expanded the use of Netwrix Privilege Secure to control admin access to Network Switch Management, VMware vCenter, security cameras, local admin accounts for Windows laptops/desktops, etc.

Key benefits

• Minimized security risk
• Stress-free audits
• Less routine work