Privileged access is the gateway to an organization’s most valuable assets and is at the core of nearly every major security breach. Organizations must have a strategy in place to manage and monitor privileged access, as well as detect and respond to threats if they’d like to mitigate risk from today’s advanced attacks.

Your application stack and infrastructure is likely quite complex and it can be hard to identify which assets are the most sensitive. And there is a never-ending supply of vendors knocking down your door competing for your time and attention. These two realities make it increasingly difficult to identify which security project to tackle next. When thinking about how to prioritize, it is advantageous to take a step back and think about your businesses goals, albeit in a slightly different way: try to envision what you would be looking for if you were an external attacker or malicious insider looking to steal sensitive data, commit Ransomware, or use your infrastructure for illicit cryptomining.

Forrester estimates that 80% of security breaches involve privileged credentials.1 Privilege is THE common denominator in virtually every serious attack, and the reason is clear: Attackers need privileged accounts, credentials and secrets to gain the permissions or tools allowing them to pose as an insider and gain access to privileged information or assets. Privileged access is needed in order to access network infrastructure and steal data. However, without privileged access, an attacker is severely limited.

The harsh reality is that no organization can ever fully secure all of their applications and infrastrucuture, whether their data center is on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid. Protection from all of the various methods that attackers may use is impossible; they will get in, it’s what they do. There is no single solution available in the market today that will prevent every advanced cyber-attack. But prioritizing what matters most first – privileged access – needs to be at the core of every enterprise organization’s strategy.