How it works

Effective Management of System Administrators

Restricting access to mission critical servers, while allowing your system administrators and privileged users to perform their responsibilities, raises many challenges. It is typical for system administrators to have excessive privileges over many servers, due to the nature of their role. These privileged accounts pose a huge security risk to the organization.

Logging on to a server with a privileged account also carries major operational concerns, as it is all too easy for an administrator to inadvertently change a critical setting or access services for which they have no responsibility. The lack of sufficient auditing can make it difficult to track down problems and ensure that system administrators are only using their privileges for the role they are authorized to perform.

Privilege Management

Rather than allowing your system administrators to log on with privileged accounts, Privilege Guard can assign elevated rights to individual applications and tasks. With Privilege Guard you can assign admin rights or custom privileges to the applications that require them.

Application Control

Depending on the role of the server, you may wish to ensure that only authorized applications are executed on the server and block any attempt to run any applications that have not been white listed. If strict application control is too restrictive, the administrator may simply be warned of their actions and audited.

On Demand Elevation

Where an administrator requires flexibility on a server, Privilege Guard integrates with the Windows shell menu to provide an "on demand" elevation facility. All elevated applications are audited, ensuring the administrator does not abuse this privilege and they can optionally be warned of their actions.

End User Messaging

Display a message to the system administrator before a privileged application is launched, to provide them with additional information, such as warning them of their actions. You may also want them to re-authenticate and provide a reason for their actions, which will be audited.

Privilege Monitoring

In addition to providing high level auditing of privileged applications, Privilege Guard can also log details of all privileged operations, such as access to the file system, registry and interaction with services. These application forensics allows closer inspection of the privileged changes that have been made to a server.

Centralized Management

Privilege Guard is tightly integrated with Windows Group Policy and no additional backend infrastructure is required to implement the solution. It can be configured in minutes and deployed through Active Directory Group Policy to target Windows servers.

Simple Policy Configuration

Enabling an application to run with elevated rights couldn’t be easier. Define the application in the Privilege Guard Policies, set its identification options and simply assign the application to the users who require elevated rights over it.

Custom Access Tokens

Application activity is audited and may be centralized through Microsoft Windows Event Forwarding. The Privilege Guard reporting console provides centralized reporting on applications and their assigned privileges.