The use case of privileged access management is self-explanatory. A large telecommunication company like ours needs to protect our privileged access because every attack cycle has privilege escalation, and we have to stop attackers at this point.

We have a lot of vendors or third parties working with us. They need to access our resources. The trust level of external third parties is lower than direct employees, so we do not want to share our critical credentials with them. That is our primary use case.

Another use case is managing internal employees, especially highly privileged administrators. Furthermore, the critical business applications and areas throughout our IT infrastructure involve privileged access, and we aim to protect those. We want the ability to audit and have real-time control.

I appreciate CyberArk's real-time capabilities. I can secure critical sessions, such as SSH or database sessions. As a security professional, I have real-time visibility into ongoing sessions. If anything suspicious occurs, I can terminate or freeze the session, which is part of user behavior analytics.

We can monitor and have real-time control over our environment with sessions coming from around the world, ensuring security. We have visibility and control through real-time user behavior analytics. That is my favorite feature.

It has a learning curve and is a complex product that requires dedicated training and people.

Maintaining the product is challenging. Upgrades require a lot of resources, as it impacts the entire organization. For example, upgrading components like the Privileged Session Manager (PSM) and the vault is time-consuming and difficult. In the long term, I would like to see these processes simplified, especially for on-premise installations.

I have been using this solution since 2018, which is a little over six years for me.

The product is solid and works as designed. The product itself is not yet very mature. That is one side. Another side is not putting enough resources into it as a customer. Most of the time, any stability issues are mostly with the customer, not the vendor. Proper fine-tuning and expertise ensure the product performs well.

It is highly scalable. We started small and expanded it to an enterprise level, and are now moving to the cloud for further growth. Its architecture offers scalability. It can grow much bigger than our company. It provides all the flexibility and modules if you have the required expertise.

CyberArk's customer service has improved recently and is now very responsive. However, four to five years ago, they were average. They are now at acceptable levels.

We are fully on-prem for the PAM, but we are moving to the cloud.

Its deployment is not easy due to CyberArk's complexity. We started from a small footprint and then moved to a larger deployment. It was a lot of work. This could not be managed without CyberArk-certified engineers. It is very complex.

We can never deploy and manage it fully by ourselves. No company has that expertise, so you always need CyberArk-certified engineers from a third party when it comes to critical things. We have over 30 servers running for the CyberArk solution. All 30 servers have different pieces of this complete solution. We can never upgrade it by ourselves without professional services. We can do some of the things ourselves, such as day-to-day management, troubleshooting, and operations, but for upgrades, installations, migrations, and disaster recovery, we need professional services. We have a separate budget every year for professional services.

We have a team including myself from governance, a project manager, senior leadership, and hands-on team members, among others. It requires four to five people from security and two CyberArk-certified engineers. I need two engineers because if one gets sick in the middle, the other person can take over because there is no going back when we start the upgrades and critical changes. We have four to seven knowledgeable and dedicated people in a critical scenario.

Pricing is a problem. CyberArk is expensive compared to other products I know. It is similar to buying a German car. It comes with all the bells and whistles, but some companies may find it too expensive.

I compared CyberArk with a product called Delinea. I preferred CyberArk because Delinea required additional agents installed on each target for session recording, whereas CyberArk does not. There was a difference between the two products in how they did the session recording. Because Delinea needs an extra agent installed on each target to do the session recording, you have a huge amount of work managing those target agents on probably thousands of servers. You need another team to do that. An extra workforce is needed to manage that. That was the first turn-off for me. CyberArk does not need an agent. It is in real-time. It drops DLLs to the target host during the session so that you do not need to manage the agent.

The most important aspect for us was that Delinea did not have real-time controls. They said they were developing that piece. They could only analyze recordings after the event had already happened, but then you are too late. All the artificial intelligence and machine learning were applied for the post-event activities. That was a big differentiator. CyberArk's real-time controls set it apart as Delinea only analyzed recordings after events.

These were the two main reasons for going with CyberArk. Everything else was fine. For an average-sized company, Delinea is fine, but for a large-scale company, CyberArk is a better choice.

It took us some time to realize its benefits because there was a learning curve for us. It took us about a year to get our heads around this product and start effectively using it. It is a journey. It takes at least five years for any company to make this product very useful and reach maturity. It is not only the product's fault. The company needs to have a vision, and the company culture needs to go with it. Senior leadership needs to support the vision. You need to have lots of ingredients for success. If everything is in place, you will see success after one year. In the first year, it is a struggle for everybody.

My company was bought by a bigger company, and they were very new to privileged access management. Everybody was struggling. The advice I would give is to have a good vision for privileged access management. You need dedicated teams, senior management support, and proper company policies and standards before implementing the solution. Start building knowledge slowly and avoid jumping into the deep end without preparation.

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

I use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for privileged access management for our IT administrative team. It helps in managing access to IT systems.

By implementing this solution, we wanted to monitor and manage access. We wanted to control who can log into which machine.

Our administrators no longer have to save the passwords or credentials in a file or spreadsheet to share with colleagues. Everything is organized in a vault. We have logs on which credentials were used and at what time on a machine.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is very powerful and customizable. We are able to customize it as per our needs.

It has been stable over the last four years, and we have a good overview of the usage of every credential on hosts and endpoints. Our infrastructure consists of many solutions and pieces, and CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is one of the important pieces.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager has not helped us reduce the number of privileged accounts, but it certainly helps us manage our privileged accounts. Without it, it would not be possible to manage them.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager assists us in meeting compliance and regulatory requirements from the government, the European Central Bank, and our customers. It is hard to measure the time saved on satisfying compliance requirements related to financial services by implementing CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, but without it, it would not be possible for us to meet these requirements.

The most valuable features of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager are its robust functionality and reliability.

It has reduced the mean time to respond, but it is hard to provide any metrics. Its log and audit files are very helpful when we have to investigate an incident.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager helps ensure data privacy because we now know who is using which credentials and at what time.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager did not have much effect on our operational efficiency because it is a new tool for us. Any new tool means more work. It has also not saved us costs, but without it, we would not be able to meet the requirements for operating our bank.

We were able to realize its benefits immediately after the deployment.

The graphical user interface could be simplified and harmonized for better usability. It should be consistent. Its GUI is very confusing.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for four years.

Overall, the stability of the solution is high. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

Currently, it meets my organization's capacity requirements. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have about 6,000 employees at different locations. We have different operating systems, database systems, and decentralized infrastructure.

Their technical support is good, but it can be better. Even if we provide everything required along with the ticket, we get a standard response asking for the logs. They do not go into analyzing the issue. They just ask for the log files. I would rate their support a six out of ten.

We did not use any solution before CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. This is the first solution we are using for Privileged Access Management.

Its implementation took us a year because we have a complicated infrastructure. It requires support from a consultant or an implementation partner. You cannot install it yourself. The automatic onboarding of the privileged accounts is a lot of work.

It requires maintenance because if your infrastructure changes, you have to take care of all the new credentials. If you also have a cloud setup, you need to figure out how to connect everything. There is a lot of work involved in maintaining it. It is not easy.

We took the help of a third party for deployment and customization.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is on the expensive side.

I would recommend CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to other users. It is one of the leaders in Gartner's Quadrant. It is stable.

My overall rating for the solution is an eight out of ten.

We have the identity provider for all the authentication processes. However, sometimes, we need access to different applications for customers or clients that are not integrated into the identity provider. For these, we need to store a password to gain access. For example, we use the CyberArk Password Vault for third-party services. This vault needs to be shared with many people in our company.

This allows us to store passwords and create privileged access for some users without them needing to know the password. The system inputs the password into the endpoint URLs they use for authentication, but the users never see the password. This is crucial because people may leave the company, posing a high risk. If we had integrated it into the identity provider, we would have policies for active directory users but not for users outside the company.

For example, our development teams need to connect to databases, systems, and cloud services during development. The developers don’t get access to third-party services. We use the solution to manage this access. The application being developed and deployed integrates with CyberArk Password Vault services.

The main challenge was integrating with in-house IT and business applications, which are not standard. We needed to create special updates for that kind of integration.

I have been working with the product for three to four years.

The solution is 99 percent scalable.

Sometimes, support is not easy because you need to share the company's architecture. Maybe they are on time, but they don't understand the specifics we're talking about. Communication can be an issue, especially when speaking with people whose first language isn't English. There can be difficulties with understanding and making sense of conversations. So, outsourcing support can sometimes be challenging.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's deployment is complex.

I have been working with the new services and don't see any additional issues at this hour. The key requirement is to have people who understand not only the tool but also the concepts and how to view it from an architectural perspective.

One problem is that people may not know how to work with the tool, and another is that they don't understand the concepts. So, I think focusing on proof of concepts is good. For example, what I do at first is request information for identity providers and key management services.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

I use the solution mainly for credential tasks. For instance, if the company I work for has recent data stored in a privileged report and needs security from cyber attackers, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is used. The solution helps provide access only to authorized users and rotate passwords every sixty or ninety days. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager also allows the configuration of the password either manually or automatically.

In our organization, Privileged Session Managers (PSM) assist in recording sessions of a particular server using the solution. The product allows users to utilize different permissions, such as end-user, auditor, and administrator permissions. For CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, administrators have the major access to implement tasks like creating, changing, rotating the password and adding new users.

The most valuable feature of this tool is the password rotation feature. Another vital feature of the solution is the Safe feature, which acts as a container. Only accounts included within the Safe can access a particular server.

The solution allows the distinguished use of PSM and PSMP for a Windows and Linux server, respectively. The tool makes all session recordings compulsory and cannot be tampered with. It also eliminates hard-coded credentials and supports demand-based applications.

CyberArk is very popular and provides a lot of features compared to competitors' PAM tools, which is why many customers are migrating to CyberArk's Privileged Access Manager.

The solution should be able to completely mitigate internal threats. For instance, if an employee of a company saves the CyberArk passwords in a system, then another employee might be able to use it and log in, so there remains an internal threat when using the solution.

The feature of giving user access through a Safe should be modified. The solution should allow users access directly through an account, and the Safe concept needs to be improved.

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

In my organization, about ninety to one hundred people are using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager.

It's easy to setup and install CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Multiple components need to be installed for the solution. Often, the PVWA, PSM, and CPM need to be installed. If an organization has a Linux account, then PSMP needs to be installed for using the solution. While installing the solution, the Vaults need to be defined, if it's a standalone Vault or a cluster Vault. A cluster Vault is mostly implemented for disaster recovery to replicate data when something happens to the main Vault.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager comes at a high cost. But the solution is worth its price.

I would recommend the solution to others depending on their goals. If the aim is to protect an organization's data and use PAM, then one should use CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. If the goals include detecting malicious activity, onboarding privileged accounts, and maintaining data accounts, then an organization should adopt the solution.

I have used the solution's session monitoring capabilities to monitor user activities. The solution's session monitoring feature can be useful for monitoring a user while the person logs in or performs other molecular activities.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is difficult and time-consuming to learn in comparison to other IAM tools. There are multiple components, like the vault, that need to be understood before using the solution. But basic administrator tasks like onboarding accounts and rotating passwords will be easy for a beginner user of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. A beginner-level user of the solution may face challenges with secret rotating, management and AIM handling.

I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager an eight out of ten.

Primarily, I import accounts from our critical systems.

Knowing that our passwords are stored securely within the vault has been a big improvement. It eliminates the need for users to store passwords in less secure locations.

We want to integrate it with our IT service management platform and our SOC solution, but that's a future project.

The password protection itself is the most important feature. It's something we didn't have before.

Moreover, the interface is intuitive. It is clear and user-friendly.

The session monitoring and recording feature is also a good feature feature, but we're currently experiencing an issue with session monitoring not working correctly. We're working with CyberArk to resolve it.

We aren't able to view active sessions or historical recordings of sessions.

It is complex, which is something I know CyberArk is working on. They're trying to simplify certain administration tasks because a common critique is the level of complexity. But overall, we can do everything we need with it.

So, CyberArk could still focus on making it more user-friendly.

I have been using it for a year.

So far, we haven't had any scalability problems.

We have around 50 licensed users – primarily administrators. We currently manage about 5,000 accounts with CyberArk.

Sometimes, the initial response time is a bit slow, but once the customer service and support take on a case, they resolve issues quickly.

CyberArk handled the primary setup tasks. We worked with a partner to implement additional components and now have the knowledge to manage the solution ourselves.

The implementation process took around eight months.

There has been an ROI.

We expect to see a full return on investment within the next three years. This was part of our long-term security plan.

It is expensive, but the cost is justified considering the security it provides. Compared to other solutions, it is costly. We have not tried other solutions, but the price is high.

We only license Password Vault.

My company evaluated another solution like Delinea but preferred CyberArk due to its robustness and flexibility.

I like its flexibility, while adding some complexity, allows us to fully customize the solution to our needs.

One of the main advantages is the way we can connect from outside. We use a portal that provides secure access to our systems without needing a VPN. We just scan a QR code, and we're connected. We do not need to use a password and we are in through the QR code scan.

I would recommend using it. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It's a very complete solution for what we need.

Previously, we used to share passwords for service and normal admin accounts among team members. However, since we started managing it through the product, we've transitioned to individual admin accounts or implemented dual control for shared accounts. With dual control, exclusive checking and checkout options are available, and passwords are not stored in clear text anywhere in the credentials.

The solution's most valuable features are automatic password rotation, privilege manager, and secret manager. Previously, IT personnel had admin rights on their regular accounts, allowing them to log in to domain controllers. However, this posed a security risk as compromised accounts could grant unauthorized access to domain controllers. To mitigate this risk, we implemented separate DA accounts for IT staff. These DA accounts were restricted from logging in to domain controllers and did not have associated email addresses. They were dedicated AD accounts solely for accessing domain controllers, and the solution handled their management.

Previously, manually rotating admin credentials was a time-consuming task. However, implementing the tool's automatic password management feature has made this process easier. We've configured defined policies within the solution to dictate when these credentials should be changed.

The tool's UI has bugs and lags. It needs to be improved. The deployment process can be complex due to multiple components for various functionalities, each requiring separate infrastructure management. To simplify this process, consolidating all these components into a single platform could be beneficial. The product's pricing could be cheaper.

I have been using the product for eight to nine years.

I rate the product's stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten.

The tool's support gets worse each year. Support is outsourced to smaller companies, which doesn't work fine. Its support was good eight to nine years back. Over the years, it hasn't improved but degraded.

I work with BeyondTrust. BeyondTrust's UI and support are good and never lag. BeyondTrust is also cheaper.

CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault's implementation timeline largely depends on the size and complexity of the infrastructure. A smaller infrastructure with around a thousand servers can typically be implemented within a week or two. However, the implementation process may extend to four or five months for more extensive infrastructures with tens or hundreds of thousands of workstations and accounts. The tool's transition into a security-focused product necessitates strong integration with security orchestration platforms. Prebuilt packages with ready-made integrations are required instead of developing everything from scratch. It lags in automation.

We have seen 40-50 percent improvements after using the solution.

I rate the product a seven out of ten.