Privileged Access Management for Secure Storage Administration: IBM Spectrum Scale with IBM Security Verify Privilege Vault

There is a growing insider security risk to organizations. Human error, privilege misuse, and cyberespionage are considered the top insider threats. One of the most dangerous internal security threats is the privileged user with access to critical data, which is the "crown jewels" of the organization. This data is on storage, so storage administration has critical privilege access that can cause major security breaches and jeopardize the safety of sensitive assets. Organizations must maintain tight control over whom they grant privileged identity status to for storage administration. Extra storage administration access must be shared with support and services teams when required. There also is a need to audit critical resource access that is required by compliance to standards and regulations.

IBM® Security™ Verify Privilege Vault On-Premises (Verify Privilege Vault), formerly known as IBM Security™ Secret Server, is the next-generation privileged account management that integrates with IBM Storage to ensure that access to IBM Storage administration sessions is secure and monitored in real time with required recording for audit and compliance. Privilege access to storage administration sessions is centrally managed, and each session can be timebound with remote monitoring. You also can use remote termination and an approval workflow for the session. In this IBM Redpaper, we demonstrate the integration of IBM Spectrum® Scale and IBM Elastic Storage® Server (IBM ESS) with Verify Privilege Vault, and show how to use privileged access management (PAM) for secure storage administration.

This paper is targeted at storage and security administrators, storage and security architects, and chief information security officers.