CyberArk

Definition

CyberArk is a cybersecurity company specializing in privileged access management, providing tools that secure, rotate, and monitor the credentials used by administrators, service accounts, and automated systems to access an organization's most sensitive systems and infrastructure. Rather than managing every user account in an organization, its focus is narrowly on the smaller set of accounts that carry elevated permissions, since compromise of one of those accounts typically gives an attacker far more reach than compromise of an ordinary employee login.

Overview

CyberArk's core focus is privileged access management, a security discipline concerned specifically with accounts that carry elevated permissions — domain administrators, database root accounts, cloud IAM roles with broad access, and service accounts used by applications — because compromise of a privileged credential typically gives an attacker far more reach than compromising an ordinary user account. Its flagship Privileged Access Manager product vaults these credentials, rotates them on a schedule or after use, and can broker sessions so that a human administrator never directly sees or handles the underlying password. Session brokering means a human administrator connects to CyberArk's platform rather than directly to the target server, and CyberArk itself supplies the underlying credential to establish the connection, so the administrator never sees, copies, or is able to reuse the raw password outside of that brokered session. Beyond the core vault, CyberArk's portfolio includes Endpoint Privilege Manager, which enforces least-privilege policies on workstations by removing local administrator rights while still allowing specific approved actions, and Conjur, a secrets management product for machine identities and DevOps pipelines that plays a similar role to HashiCorp Vault for automated systems. CyberArk has also expanded into broader identity security, including cloud entitlements management that analyzes and rightsizes excessive permissions granted to cloud identities. Credential rotation on a schedule, or immediately after each use for particularly sensitive accounts, limits how long a captured or intercepted credential would remain valid even if it were somehow obtained by an attacker outside the normal session-brokering flow. CyberArk is widely regarded as a market leader specifically in the privileged access management category, competing with BeyondTrust and, to a lesser extent, with broader identity platforms like SailPoint that focus more on identity governance than credential vaulting itself. Its differentiation is depth of focus on the privileged account problem specifically, with mature session recording, credential rotation, and just-in-time access provisioning capabilities refined over a long operating history in this space. Conjur specifically extends this privileged-access focus to non-human identities, letting an automated deployment pipeline retrieve a credential dynamically rather than embedding it in a script, which places CyberArk in some of the same territory as HashiCorp Vault for that particular use case. Organizations adopt CyberArk when privileged account compromise represents a top-tier risk, commonly in regulated industries such as finance and healthcare where auditors specifically examine how administrative and service account credentials are controlled. Smaller organizations with fewer privileged accounts and simpler infrastructure sometimes find the operational complexity of a full privileged access management deployment outweighs the risk it mitigates, opting instead for lighter controls until their infrastructure and headcount grow. A regulated organization's auditors typically want to see specifically how administrator and service account credentials are stored, rotated, and logged, and CyberArk's session recording and vaulting are usually the artifacts produced to satisfy that specific line of inquiry during an audit. Deploying and operating a full privileged access management program is a meaningful undertaking, since discovering every existing privileged account across an estate is itself nontrivial, so organizations with only a handful of administrative accounts sometimes defer adopting a dedicated platform until their infrastructure grows large enough to justify it.

Key Features

• Vaulting and automatic rotation of privileged account credentials
• Session brokering so administrators never directly see underlying passwords
• Endpoint Privilege Manager for removing unnecessary local admin rights
• Conjur secrets management for DevOps and machine identities
• Session recording and monitoring for privileged account activity
• Just-in-time access provisioning limiting standing privileged access
• Cloud entitlements management to rightsize excessive cloud permissions
• Long-standing market focus specifically on privileged access management

Use Cases

Alternatives

Frequently Asked Questions

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