Is it time to rethink your third-party remote access platform?

Why enterprises & vendors need third-party remote access platforms

Enterprise organizations around the world rely on third-party software applications to keep their businesses running both securely and efficiently. These necessary relationships between enterprises and vendors, however, are known to be risky because they are a top attack vector for hackers. These attacks, no matter what form they come in, are known to cause a lot of harm to the affected organization. This harm can come in the form of a loss of customers, a damaged reputation, or a mistrust of the brand itself. To save your reputation and customer base, enterprise organizations and third-party vendors need to implement a secure remote access platform. In other words, it isn't up to just one side of the equation to care about the relationship; enterprise organizations and their vendors must work together to create a secure, effective, and efficient vendor access management program. Within this relationship, compliance continues to be an issue because if your vendors aren't compliant, and if you, as the enterprise, have no visibility into compliance-- you aren't going to be compliant with any mandates. The right third-party remote access platform makes compliance painless to manage because it exists on a single platform that lets the enterprise or vendor manage remote access permissions, audit remote sessions, and manage third-party connections.

Enterprise organizations can have dozens, if not hundreds, of different external entities that need to access their networks, like vendors, contractors, and other third parties. No matter how many third parties, ensure that the remote access platform you choose is scalable, easy to use, and simple to deploy. You also want to ensure that it standardizes and centralizes access controls of technology vendors on a purpose-built platform. Access controls allow enterprise organizations to easily control and monitor all connections needed to keep applications up and running. This means that your remote access platform improves efficiency and decreases the amount of downtime frequently encountered with other platforms. You also want to ensure that your remote access platform reinforces security, ensures efficiency, and helps to ensure regulatory compliance. With the right secure remote access platform, you will be able to:

• Eliminate the security risk of shared logins and ad-hoc support methods
• Streamline provisioning of remote access with a simple interface
• Audit access trails and vendors' signing on
• Meet and maintain regulatory compliance standards (e.g. HIPAA, HITECH, PCI DSS, CJIS, etc.)

Standardize remote support with a third-party remote access platform

Whether you're an enterprise that needs remote support or you're a vendor that offers remote support, the platform should be standardized so that both sides of the equation can use the same tool. When you use a standardized platform,  vendor reps are now able focus on supporting customers instead of managing passwords, remembering what customer uses what tool, and ensures that everyone is as secure and efficient as possible. If you forgo a standardized remote support platform, the task of managing passwords becomes increasingly difficult when adding more and more customers. Further, authenticating various support technicians can lead to security risks, like shared logins. When using Imprivata, vendors' customers set the rules, and give access when a vendor needs it. By having all support activity on a singular remote access platform, technicians now have more time to focus on projects that can further grow their business. In other words, Imprivata is here to take away the worry of managing remote access while streamlining processes, reducing liability, and automating tasks. With Imprivata, the days of managing passwords, calling help desks, or troubleshooting IT issues are in the past. With a click on a case management system, technicians can immediately begin work in a customer’s network with native access to RDP, web servers, databases, and any other resource they may need access to in order to do their job. In other words, Imprivata was built for enterprise and third-party vendors to do their jobs more efficiently without worrying about security. With the right secure remote support platform, you will be able to:

• Dramatically improve productivity with access to customer networks with a click of a button
• Eliminate the uncapped liability of sharing logins of privileged credentials and using unsecured support tools
• Reduce time to resolution
• Automate routine tasks, like gathering log files or system information
• Reduce downtime by monitoring customer systems for impending faults
• Reduce cost and resources of remote support management by eliminating infrastructure and IT management

Secure remote access platforms properly protect data

Whether you’re an enterprise organization or a third-party vendor, protecting data is imperative. As we have seen with the number of cyberattacks that continue to plague news cycles, there is no shortage of hackers that are looking to steal, destroy, or hold data for ransom. If you work with external entities like vendors, it's imperative to invest in the best secure remote access platform to secure your data (or your customers' data) from hackers. Your secure remote access platform must come with IT security audit tools that are specifically designed to deliver a well-rounded view of all third-party remote access activity down to the keystroke level. For enterprise organizations, the audit function ensures vendor accountability and compliance with industry standards and regulations. For vendors, they are able to monitor and prove accountability for the who, what, where, when, and why of any remote support session. To ensure that your security standards and access controls are up to par, view our Third-Party Vendor Access Checklist.