Privileged Access
Management
Privileged Accounts Are the Master Keys to Your OT Environment
Privileged accounts—administrator credentials on SCADA servers, engineering workstations, firewalls, and control systems—represent the highest-value targets in any OT environment. When these accounts are compromised, attackers gain the authority to modify configurations, disable safety systems, or take full control of critical processes. Managing and monitoring these accounts is foundational to OT security.
Many industrial environments have accumulated shared administrator passwords, default vendor credentials, and service accounts that have never been rotated—some for years. This credential sprawl creates an enormous attack surface that is invisible to traditional security tools. PAM solutions bring order to this chaos by discovering, managing, and controlling every privileged account in the environment.
Regulatory frameworks including ISA/IEC 62443, NERC CIP, and NIS2 require organizations to demonstrate that access to critical systems is controlled, monitored, and audited. In the event of a security incident, the ability to produce a complete session record of who accessed what system, when, and what they did is the difference between a rapid investigation and a months-long forensic exercise.
What OT Privileged Access Management should do
Privileged Account Discovery & Management
Automatically discover all privileged accounts across your OT environment—SCADA servers, PLCs, firewalls, historians, and engineering workstations. Enforce strong, unique, rotated passwords managed centrally and never exposed to end users.
Role-Based Access Control
Grant access to industrial systems based on job function and operational need—not blanket administrator rights. Ensure that engineers, operators, vendors, and IT staff can only access the specific systems their role requires.
Session Monitoring & Recording
Monitor all privileged sessions in real time with live over-the-shoulder visibility and immediate disconnect capability. Record every session in full for audit, compliance, and forensic investigation purposes.
OT PAM Features That Protect Critical Infrastructure
Multi-Factor Authentication Enforcement
Require MFA for all privileged access to OT systems, ensuring that stolen credentials cannot grant access without a second factor. Reduce the risk of account compromise from phishing, insider threats, and brute-force attacks.
Password Vault & Automatic Rotation
Store all privileged credentials in an encrypted vault and rotate them automatically on a policy-driven schedule. Eliminate shared passwords, default credentials, and the human risk of manual password management.
Active Directory Hardening
Integrate PAM with Active Directory to centralize identity management across your OT environment. Enforce authentication policies, prevent credential reuse, and maintain full audit capability across all privileged accounts.
Compliance Audit Trail
Generate comprehensive, tamper-proof audit logs of every privileged access event across your OT environment. Meet ISA/IEC 62443, NERC CIP, NIS2, and cyber insurance requirements with evidence-ready reporting.
