How do you manage emergency access to IT resources when an administrator is away?

Assume one of the administrators in your IT department happens to be away from office and an emergency situation arises when you need to access some of the IT resources owned / controlled by that administrator. What will you do and how will you manage things?

The above scenario is not theoretical. Most of the enterprises would have faced this situation. The fact is that many organizations still follow the traditional practice of printing the passwords on paper and keeping them on a physical vault, which would remain under the control of the IT head.

When a situation as described above arises, you will have to either track the person who is away from office or you will have to get the credentials from the physical vault. After accessing the resource, the IT head will have to ensure that the passwords of the resources that were accessed during the emergency situation, are changed to avoid misuse of credentials. The problem does not end here – the paper on the physical vault has to be updated with the new passwords and the resource owner, when he/she comes back, will have to be provided with the new passwords.

This manual process is quite cumbersome, error-prone and highly insecure. Replacing the manual processes by deploying a digital password password vault, could solve problems like this in fully automated fashion, yet ensuring the highest level of security.

ManageEngine Password Manager Pro helps in securely storing, selectively sharing and automatically resetting the administrative passwords in the enterprise. While passwords would be strictly shared based on roles and job-responsibilities, there is provision to have the role of ‘super-administrators’ who will have the privilege to access all the passwords. In emergency situations like the above, super-administrators can temporarily provide access to select resources. The password release would follow a workflow and it would be automatically reset after revocation of the access.

The IT department of Fitchburg State University faced this situation exactly and they chose Password Manager Pro to solve the problems related to administrative passwords. Sherry Horeanopoulos, Information Security Officer of Fitchburg State University explains how Password Manager Pro has proved ‘Godsend’ in their environment in this video ….

Password Manager Pro has helped a lot of organizations to effectively manage their privileged identities and control access to the resources. Try Password Manager Pro now!

Bala
ManageEngine Password Manager Pro
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