Session Manager: What It Is and Why You Need It

A session manager works in conjunction with an access manager and password manager, to oversee and ensure that critical information is only accessible to specific users.

What is a Session Manager?

A session manager provides real-time monitoring and control of all privileged account sessions to prevent and detect malicious activity.

Privileged session management may be integrated into existing SIEM, Security Automation and Orchestration (SAO), and Intrusion Detection systems (IDS) to allow SecOps to identify and stop suspicious or unauthorized actions in real-time. Additionally, a session manager provides an unimpeachable audit trail that allows for compliance and incident investigation.

Key features of a session manager include:

  • Real-time monitoring and alerting.
  • Real-time control systems.
  • RDP / SSH access control.
  • OCR Systems for RDP search and control functionality.
  • Authorization workflows.
  • Compliance and audit systems.

A session manager is critical to the flow and function of your privileged access management (PAM) system. PAM is used to manage and limit the access of users in an organization to certain applications, programs, and critical information. A session manager works in conjunction with an access manager and password manager, to ensure that critical information is only accessible to specific users.

A session manager is a critical component of your PAM system, by providing control and auditing of all privileged sessions.

Key benefits of a session manager include:

  • Monitor, audit, and control privileged sessions.
  • Prevent insider attacks, privileged account escalation, and third-party access problems.
  • Prove regulatory compliance for HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, SOX, NYCRR 500, NIST SP 800, and other regulations.
  • Accelerate incident response by enabling both automatic response and mitigation while at the same time providing a searchable database and video record that allows for a start-to-finish post-mortem analysis.

Here’s the features you need from a good session manager:

Real-time monitoring and control

Monitor privileged user sessions, be alerted when suspicious activity occurs, and immediately terminate any sessions if needed.

Real-time control systems

Block forbidden actions for each privileged user account and create rules to automatically trigger alerts or terminate user access.

RDP / SSH Access control

Avoid disrupting normal workflows and tools by maintaining access via native RDP / SSH tools.

Compliance and audit systems

Provide an unalterable and unimpeachable audit trail of every action taken with a DVR-like recording that captures everything on the screen from mouse movements to text commands. It’s critical that the session manager include an optical character recognition (OCR) system so that every action is completely searchable.

Integration with SIEM, IDS, SAO

Increase the value of existing SecOps deployments and tools with easy integration.

Easy deployment

The best session manager is one that is simple to use and universally utilized. One way to estimate the ultimate usage rate of your PAM solution is by the length and complexity of the deployment process. The longer the deployment, the harder the system will be to maintain, and the lower your likely usage rate.

WALLIX has all of this and more

The WALLIX Bastion has a simple agent-less architecture designed for a simple and sustainable deployment. Customers have deployed WALLIX extremely rapidly after fruitlessly wrestling with other solutions for months. Plus, this agent-less approach significantly mitigates the risk that any changes in protected systems will require an extensive revamping of the PAM solution.

Although the WALLIX Session Manager allows for easy deployment, its sophisticated feature set can scale with even the largest organizations.

No Need to Rip and Replace.

While the Bastion comes with an excellent password vault, many organizations have already invested heavily in their password vaults and don’t want to abandon that investment. The good news is that the WALLIX Session Manager plays nicely with virtually any password vault, including solutions such as CyberArk’s password vault.

Want to Learn More?

Would you like to see a demo or talk to a session management expert? Get in touch, we’d love to chat!

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