{"id":106006,"date":"2026-06-09T15:23:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T11:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/?p=106006"},"modified":"2026-06-09T15:23:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T11:23:16","slug":"5-privilege-centric-identity-security-pillars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/5-privilege-centric-identity-security-pillars\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Privilege-Centric Identity Security Pillars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Security professionals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) operate in a nation that faces a 24-hour onslaught from cyber adversaries. And despite ranking highly in global maturity indices, we remain vulnerable to our digital attackers. A 2025 report by the UAE\u2019s Cybersecurity Council revealed the country was host<\/a> to almost 224,000 vulnerable assets and that half of all critical vulnerabilities had, at the time the report was published, \u201cremained unaddressed for [more than] five years\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UAE\u2019s economic ambitions continue to rely on robust digital infrastructure. Each organization\u2019s IT is maintained by service desks that administrate the digital machinery of business. If that machinery is misconfigured, the enterprise could be exposed to attack. The Cybersecurity Council\u2019s report cites misconfiguration as a major problem, noting that it is the root cause of almost a third (32%) of incidents. So, to secure our future, we must look to service desk security with new eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem lies with identity. We have known for some time that attackers no longer hack in; they log in. They log in with stolen identities harvested from phishing and spear-phishing campaigns, and those campaigns are becoming more sophisticated by the day because of AI. And if a service desk employee has disabled multi-factor authentication (MFA), any stolen credentials gain a longer shelf life. Service desk solutions, therefore, require closer scrutiny regarding the role they play in privileged access management (PAM). Enterprises must eliminate always-on admin rights; they must implement phishing-resistant MFA; and they must enforce secure remote support that includes credentials-hiding. Identity pathways must be easy to visualize and trace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to fight back<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modern attacker is adept at bypassing endpoint protections and controls around admin accounts by going after the service desk\u2019s ability to grant or restore permissions. A privilege\u2011centric identity security approach starts to address these issues by treating service desk identities as Tier\u20110 admin roles. In addition, service desks should use the principle of least privilege and just-in-time (JIT) access to ensure that everyone only receives the permissions they need to fulfil their role, and even then, only for as long as they need. It also helps to build a clear identity map, and to enforce brokered secure access (no more VPN). Consider the five pillars of service desk security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Ability to verify<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The service desk must have strong authentication methods, out of the box, and must be resistant to all known social-engineering techniques. The level of verification must always, in context, rise to match the level of risk. This means accounting for both the user (admins, service desk agents, executives, and so on) and the action they are performing (such as disabling MFA or resetting a password). For high-risk scenarios, use phishing-resistant login methods that add further verification methods such as callbacks. Further context, like device patch status, geolocation, and recent account behavior, is also vital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Least privilege<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as with other users, service desk roles should be task-audited to determine who does what and when. Permission sets can then be assigned quickly in real time for the task being performed. Broad, non-relevant powers should be a thing of the past as organizations take a close look at what each technician does and what access, elevated or other, they need. When granted, the access should be JIT, only issued for a ticket-linked window and then rescinded until the next instance it is needed. Credentials should be invisible to end users and injected directly into sessions. And shared accounts should never be allowed, meaning activities are traceable to individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. No more VPNs<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secure, brokered connections should replace traditional (and vulnerable) broad VPN access. These sessions are more reliably open to recording and monitoring than even those VPN tunnels that terminate on an organization\u2019s own gateway. Brokered sessions are transparent, allowing overseers to witness file extractions or the bypassing of security policies. Any remote access tool, PowerShell, SSH, RDP, should go through the broker. Provided all these practices are observed, remote access becomes far less of a security hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Privilege visibility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the most repeated phrase in cybersecurity is, \u201cYou cannot protect what you cannot see.\u201d Comprehensive and continually updated permissions maps allow analysts to spot routes to escalation that would otherwise escape notice. Knowing these routes allows defenders to, for example, predict and identify dormant or legacy accounts that are overprivileged. When this capability is added to the security arsenal, then real\u2011time alerts for events like the resetting of a privileged password become more context-sensitive and hence, more actionable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Workflow controls<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most sensitive actions undertaken, those that brush up against critical infrastructure or sensitive data, should be subject to dual authorization. Any business should require multiple sign-offs on major actions, but to ensure that service desks are not hampered by governance, policies should be written, clear, and thoroughly tested for efficiency. The high-risk actions that surround identity management should be tied to a verifiable trail through session logs. All this is crucial not only for sound governance and compliance, but for smooth auditing and rapid investigations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern PAM for service desks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The five pillars of service desk security, the backbone of a well-functioning enterprise\u2019s approach to today\u2019s threat landscape, are best implemented through a holistic privileged access management platform. Modern PAM solutions are well-versed in delivering the five pillars without compromising the efficiency of internal service desk workflows. Modern PAM looks after privileged accounts, monitors actions, and maps out entitlements. Its capabilities are ideally placed to address the understandable concerns of today\u2019s service desks, given the amount of power they wield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern PAM is the go-to solution for just\u2011in\u2011time privilege provisioning and role governance, granting only the permissions needed for the duration required by tying access to tickets and protecting everything with MFA. PAM includes secure access and hides credentials in real time through brokered sessions rather than direct logins. PAM\u2019s identity verification is stronger, and its MFA is more phishing-resistant. For high-risk users like service desk agents, it uses hardware-backed authentication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the cyberthreats the UAE faces, Modern PAM is purpose-built and futureproof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Layale Hachem, Principal Solutions Engineer at <\/em><\/strong>BeyondTrust<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Security professionals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) operate in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":106007,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9715],"tags":[10518],"contributor":[9732],"class_list":["post-106006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-expert-opinion","tag-expert-opinion","contributor-news-desk"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/BeyondTrust.jpg.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Rabab","author_link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/author\/rabab\/"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106006"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106008,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106006\/revisions\/106008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106006"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=106006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}