Build & Respond

Privileged access management

Extend privileged access management past the accounts everyone remembered to enroll: service accounts, shared admin logins and break-glass, with the records an auditor and an incident responder both need.

Ali Aleali

Ali Aleali, CISSP, CCSP

Co-Founder & Principal Consultant

Former security architect for Bank of Canada and Payments Canada. CISSP, CCSP, more than twenty years in enterprise security. Leads every engagement.

Connect on LinkedIn

What the engagement covers

Inventory first. You cannot vault, rotate or monitor accounts you cannot list.

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Privileged account inventory

Human, service and application accounts across cloud, infrastructure, SaaS and identity providers, with owners and blast radius.

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Coverage plan by risk

Internet-facing and production first, then administrative planes by blast radius, then the rest in proportion. A sequence account owners will accept.

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Vaulting, rotation and session control design

What goes in the vault, what gets rotated on what cadence, where session recording is worth it, and where it is not.

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Break-glass done properly

Named accounts for daily operations, shared accounts limited to break-glass with alerting and post-use rotation.

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Service account and secrets hygiene

Ownership, rotation and the compensating controls where rotation is not feasible, documented as a risk acceptance.

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Evidence for the audit

Access reviews, attribution and rotation records produced by normal operation.

Assess, Build, Operate, applied to privileged access

We are independent of every PAM vendor. The product's own engineers deploy it; we decide what goes in it and prove it works. A documented methodology, led by a senior architect with more than ten years of enterprise security experience and a CISSP.

01

Assess

Every privileged account with an owner and a blast radius. Sequenced by exposure and impact.

02

Build

Vault scope, rotation cadence, session control, break-glass, and the exceptions with compensating controls.

03

Operate

Waves by risk tier, with the vendor's engineers on the product and Truvo on the design. Evidence and access review cadence handed to your team.

What you hold at the end

A privileged access program that answers the auditor's question and the incident responder's question with the same records.

  • Privileged account inventory with owners

  • Coverage plan by risk tier

  • Vault, rotation and session control design

  • Break-glass procedure with monitoring

  • Exception register with compensating controls

  • Access review cadence and evidence

What changes

Attribution, coverage and a record.

When a PAM engagement is the right call, and when it is not

Rolled out in waves, starting with the accounts that matter most.

Frequently asked questions

In our experience, the first wave enrolls the accounts people remember, and the rest are service accounts with no rotation owner, infrastructure logins shared by a stable team, and secrets in pipelines. Coverage stalls because there is no inventory to work from and no agreed order. The fix starts with the inventory and a sequence by exposure and blast radius.

Trust substitutes for controls until an incident. If a shared account is compromised there is no way to tell which session was the attacker's, what they did, or when it began, and the auditor's question, show me who did what, has no answer. The proportionate fix for a small team is named accounts for daily work and a monitored break-glass account, which is often achievable with the tools you already own.

We are independent of every vendor. The product's solution engineers know its reference architecture and deploy it. Truvo decides what belongs in it, in what order, with what exceptions, and produces the evidence that it works.

Not every system supports every control, and the frameworks do not require that they do. What they require is that access controls are appropriate to the risk. The exception goes in the risk register with compensating controls, such as IP allowlisting and stronger credentials, documented rather than ignored.

SOC 2 CC6.1, CC6.2 and CC6.3 expect logical access restricted to authorized individuals, provisioned and removed on a process, and reviewed. ISO 27001 Annex A covers privileged access rights directly. The engagement produces the inventory, the reviews and the attribution records those controls are tested on.

Talk to the architect who would do the work

A 30-minute call. We look at your environment and say plainly whether we can help and what it would take.

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