CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews

Managing and securing the access to the environment.

I have worked with CyberArk solutions/applications for more than three years.

I have completed several implementations, proofs of concept, operational, and development activities. I have also worked with or checked most CyberArk releases since version 8.7.

Much stricter rotation of credentials.

Unmanaged and highly privileged accounts increase risks that can be exploited. The security controls defined by the organization require protection of the privileged account passwords. CyberArk has helped us to identify, store, protect, and monitor the usage of privileged accounts.

• Controlled access and rotation of credentials.
• The Vault offers great capabilities for structuring and accessing data. 
• Central Password Manager is useful for agentless automated password management through AD integration as well as endpoints for different devices.
• Privileged Session Manager is for provisioning, securing, and recording sessions.

• The product documentation has to be more precise in certain aspects with explanations for functionality limitations along with reference material or screenshots. 
• New functionalities and discovered bugs take longer to patch. We would greatly appreciate quicker development of security patches and bug corrections.
• Online help also needs to be looked into with live agent support.

We proactively vault and manage all elevated accounts across multiple platforms. 

For especially sensitive business units, we additionally leverage Privilege Session Manager to provide transparent connection to targeted systems and record activities.

Rather than multiple tools for maintaining regulatory compliance around passwords and privileged accounts, we have centralized as much as possible with CyberArk. This is now a one stop shop for end users to access their elevated credentials.

You can gradually implement CyberArk, starting with more easily attainable goals, such as basic vaulting and password rotation and build on that with additional modules, such as Privileged Session Manager and Application Identity Manager.

While in the past, administration required several tools and multiple screens/options in those products, v10 is moving towards a single pane of glass with common functions easily found and information regarding privileged accounts given to users in plain, easy to understand terms, now enhanced with graphics.

All features of the CyberArk PAS solution are valuable.

The Digital Vault is one of the key components of the solution along with many other great benefits. The highly secured vault stores the privileged account passwords and data files using encryption. In version v9.7, CyberArk has introduced the Cluster Vault feature, which enhances high availability of the Vault server.

Other important features:

• Automatic password management
• Monitor, record, and control privileged sessions
• Flexible architecture
• Clientless product
• Custom plug-ins for managing privileged accounts and sessions

Unmanaged, highly privileged accounts increase risks that can be exploited by attackers. The security controls defined by the organization require protection of the privileged account passwords. CyberArk helps organizations to identify, store, protect, and monitor the usage of privileged accounts.

An immediate improvement was the implementation of security controls to protect, control and monitor privileged accounts through CyberArk solution.

I have used CyberArk for over two and a half years.

It’s a very stable product. I haven’t encountered any stability issues.

I haven’t encountered any scalability issues. All the components are scalable.

I would give technical support a rating of 4.5/5.

This is the first PAM product that I have used.

The initial installation was straightforward. The configuration or integration can be complex depending on the requirements, design, and infrastructure of the organization.

The pricing and licensing depend on many factors and on the components considered for implementation.

The PAM solution brings cultural change and adds a layer to the way IT administrators access the privileged accounts before implementing the PAM tool. A great, valuable product like CyberArk requires good planning and time to implement all the features.

The major use case for us is to securely release and manage passwords for non-personal accounts.

CyberArk provides an automated and unified approach for securing access across environments. It's a work in progress but that is the goal, for us, of implementing CyberArk. We want to provide a unified way to access all environments. We are in transition, like most big companies, into cloud solutions. So this is also something that is being discussed and analyzed. But that, overall, is the mission of CyberArk in our organization.

CyberArk has made it possible to work with non-personal accounts. Before, there was a much more focus on having privileges associated with personal accounts, and non-personal accounts were scarcely used because doing so required a lot of manual work. That work has been replaced with automated password management and the controls that come with CyberArk. It allows our organization to control the risks associated with high privileges. Previously, anyone could do whatever they wanted, on their own, but now we can enforce dual control. That is very important from a risk perspective. And the fact that we have it automated means it doesn't require that much effort to maintain things.

Also, when we onboard new employees, the solution saves us time, to a certain extent, when it comes to providing them with secure access to the applications and IT systems they will be working with. Those savings are not directly thanks to CyberArk, but it can be considered part of the bigger solution to make sure that employees have the correct access to the resources they need as soon as possible. That is true after they have been onboarded or when their position has changed and they need to be granted new access.

The automatic password management is the most important feature. The second most important feature is the ability to enforce dual control on the release of those passwords. The combination of these two features is the most important thing for us because we can show that we're in control of who uses any non-personal account, and when they do so.

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

My impression of the solution's stability, in general, is very positive. It's quite robust. There are mechanisms in place that allow you to have high availability and that allow you to have proper disaster recovery. Those mechanisms are very solid, as we have tested them extensively within our processes to assess the risk associated with the use of CyberArk. They have performed very well.

The only thing that is lacking with respect to the stability is the scalability issue. The amount of data we need processed is too big for CyberArk to manage properly. That mostly impacts performance, not the stability, but to some extent the stability has suffered due to that. 

But overall, I would rate it very good in terms of stability. We had a minor issue once and, other than that, we have been online the whole time that I have been here. We have tested it thoroughly and have not found any situation where it would become too unstable to perform our tasks.

The major pain point that we have is the capacity of CyberArk due to the sheer volume of NPAs that we are managing. We are a large organization and we have hundreds of thousands of non-personal accounts to manage. We have already found out that there are certain capacity limitations within CyberArk that might introduce performance issues. From my perspective, something that would be valuable would be if the Vault could hold more passwords and be more scalable.

We have used their tech support extensively and there has been a lot of improvement in the way that CyberArk support operates over the last few years, but it still leaves somewhat to be desired. That is particularly true given the pricing. You would expect, for the amount of money that they charge for their support, and for their product in general, that it would be better. 

But I've seen major improvements in the last couple of years. I think they are aware of this issue and that it is an area that they are lacking in and they're working towards improving it.

They need to better recognize who they are dealing with. CyberArk has an extensive training program, the CyberArk University. You put in a lot of effort, resources, and money, to attend the training and become a professional in terms of your knowledge and ability to manage the Vault, and the solution in general. But then, when you require support, you are asked very simple questions, which you have already answered based on the knowledge that you've obtained from CyberArk. It takes a lot of time and effort to convince their support that you indeed have a more complex case to resolve, rather than a very simple fire-and-forget solution. It's generally not the kind of thing where they can give you a link to their knowledge base and look through it to find a solution yourself.

I have been working with CyberArk for five years and have all the possible certificates, and have extensive knowledge about it. Any time that I report a case to support, it seems the general gist of how such services operate is that they're trying to get rid of you. They give you a solution that, maybe, vaguely resembles the issue, or a solution that you specifically stated that you tried already and it does not work, just to get rid of you. They probably have customers who would be happy with that, but because of the importance of that software within our organization and the level of maturity that we have within my team as administrators of CyberArk, we expect, and we've communicated this to them, that they will approach our requests in a more advanced way. 

They should recognize that we have probably already done what the first line of support would suggest be done, and that we require some more involved support, but it seems very difficult to communicate this to them. Even if we get through to further lines of support, we often have the feeling that we still know more than they do about their own tools. I think there has been some sort of knowledge drain from CyberArk. We often have the feeling that they are learning on the job. They don't inspire a lot of confidence when it comes to their support.

Neutral

There is a lot of return on investment in CyberArk. Being a financial institution, we are responsible for managing risks, and CyberArk really helps us to be in control with the usage of NPAs. That, in turn, translates into a proper risk score for the organization, and that directly translates into actual money being saved.

It's expensive, certainly. But CyberArk is the leader in the market with regards to privileged access management. You pay a lot, but you are paying for the value that is being delivered. 

It's not a tool for small companies. You need to be a large company with a lot of resources to implement it. But the price tag can be justified, even though it's always hard to quantify these things. It really brings value, regardless of the level at which you implement it. If you use it at a very basic level, as just a password manager, or you go further with all the other elements of the tool, it's expensive, but it's worth the price.

We only use it on-prem, but for someone who only wants to solve cloud security challenges with a born-in-the-cloud security solution, I would still tell them CyberArk is one of the potential solutions. I would also tell them to do their assessment because it costs a lot. So it depends on the scale of use and the use cases. It certainly has the most capabilities that could be of use, but it depends on whether you only have some small deployments in the cloud and on the size of the risks involved. For certain scenarios, I would say they should immediately go with CyberArk, and that they shouldn't bother with others' solutions. In other scenarios, I would say they should do a very thorough assessment of the market before they decide because there might be cheaper options that will be sufficient for them.

Our primary use of this solution is as a password manager.

The interface is very simple to use.

Security-wise, CyberyberArk is better than the other products.

The pricing is too expensive and should be reduced. This is our only concern. When a small industry wants to invest in these kinds of tools, they don't have the budget to spend a lot of money on security. If the price were more reasonable then many other small businesses would consider using it.

The installation process should be easier and more user-friendly so that you don't need to hire a third party to deploy it. Instead, an in-house administrator could do it.

I have been using this product for the last two years.

Over the past two years, I hardly remember us facing any large problems. We have experienced small bugs, but they release patches to fix those.

This is a scalable product. In our company, we have about 100 users, most of which are part of our DevOps team or are administrators.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

Prior to CyberArk, we were using a Microsoft product, but it didn't fulfill our entire requirement. We adopted this new solution because it met all of our needs.

The initial setup is complex. It took two or three days to complete the deployment.

We implemented this solution with the help of consultants who had experience with it.

This product is very expensive.

I have seen demonstrations of similar products by other vendors and what I found was that the security on this solution is better.

Overall, I feel that this is a good product and I recommend it. The only thing that people have to consider is pricing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using this product for our privileged identities and account management. We have some accounts that we consider privileged, the ones that have access to systems, software, tools, and our database and files and folders, etc. We try to maintain these accounts safely and try to grant access to these systems securely. We try and manage other non-human accounts that are DBAs, DB accounts, etc., through CyberArk.

Another initiative for this was the PCA compliance that we wanted to meet.

We don't have many applications in the cloud, we are getting one or two now. So in the future, we plan to utilize CyberArk's secure infrastructure applications running in the cloud. It's on the roadmap. We are utilizing CyberArk's secure application credentials but not endpoints. I have only just learned about the Plugin Generator Utility, so I don't have experience with it yet. It's pretty cool. We intend to use it now.

One way it has improved the organization is we now have restricted access for all users to go through CyberArk. It has also enforced firewall restrictions across other places so they don't go through other means, they go through CyberArk. That brings in compliance and their account is now two-factored, so that is more compliant with PCI regulations.

The way it manages privileged accounts and managed access to privileged systems such that, right now, we are recording every session through PSM and people are more aware that the session is recorded, and they're more careful with what they do.

We are using the VSM proxy solution. That's what we are mainly using. We will try to use the PTA and AIM in the future.

I think it pretty much covers a lot of the privileged identity space, things that other vendors are not thinking about. I think they are doing a very good job. I don't have any suggestions.

We have not had any stability issues so far. We have not had any serious downtime. We do see performance issues with PSM which gets very busy, and we just keep scaling the number of PSMs. When many people log in at the same time, we have some issues with connecting through PSM. We doubled our PSM software and it's better now.

It's pretty scalable. Like I said, we just doubled our servers. If there are more users logging in, we'll probably go for a greater number of servers again.

Technical support is pretty responsive and knowledgeable. We do get the right person.

Others have spoken a lot about security hygiene and I believe that's where you should start.

l would rate CyberArk at nine out of 10. The way for it to get to a 10 is with a lot of features, the amount of cost involved in buying the product, and the PSM proxy issue that we've been facing.

In terms of important criteria when working with a vendor one thing is, as we said, getting to the right person. We go to support only if there is a critical situation where we are not able to solve it. Getting to the right person at the right time, and getting the issues resolved in a timely fashion is what we are looking for.

CyberArk PAS is our go-to solution for securing against the pass the hash attack vector and auditing privileged account usage.

The CyberArk PAS has greatly increased our insight into how privileged accounts are being used and distributed within our footprint.

• Ease of use
• The auditing capabilities
• The great support of their customer success teams

Areas the product could be improved are in some of the reporting capabilities and how the reports are configured.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is used for identity and privilege access management.

The integrations are the most valuable aspect of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. The software offers pre-built integrations, and our team can also create custom connectors. This flexibility allows us to integrate with systems that we previously didn't consider integrating with, making it a significant advantage for us.

There is room for improvement in the availability of custom connectors on the marketplace for this solution. Additionally, their services for the CICD pipeline and ease of integration could be improved.

I have been using CyberArk Privileged Access Manager for approximately three years.

Once the implementation is completed and the solution is hardened, I consider it to be stable. 

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is scalable on-premise but not on the cloud.

I rate the scalability of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a seven out of ten.

The time it took for the deployment was approximately two years. It was not a simple process for the vendor. It should have been completed in one year, it took too long.

Our process steps for deployment involve specific stages, starting with onboarding Windows and Linux devices, and concluding with the onboarding of application service accounts and related components.

I rate the initial setup of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager an eight out of ten. 

The solution's deployment was completed by the vendor. 

A team of two to three people was required for the deployment of our solution. One of them had a high level of expertise in architecture and a thorough understanding of the solution. The remaining team members were junior-level personnel in charge of activities including connection development, data collection, and deployment. The vendor was also used by the team to help with data collection, planning, and execution.

The license CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is on an annual basis.

A team of five to six people would be sufficient to maintain 24/7 operations.

I would recommend reducing the fee for cancellations, but when it comes to cloud services, there are superior options available in the market.

I rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a seven out of ten.