On February 23rd, 2016, Thycotic, one of the leading vendors in the area of Privilege Management (also commonly referred to as Privileged Account Management or Privileged Identity Management) announced the acquisition of Arellia. Arellia delivers Endpoint Security functionality and, in particular, Application Control capabilities. Both Thycotic and Arellia have built their products on the Microsoft Windows platform, which will allow the more rapid integration of the two offerings.
Thycotic, with its Secret Server product, has evolved over the past years from an entry-level solution towards an enterprise-level product, with significant enhancements in functionality. With the addition of the Arellia products, Thycotic will be able not only to protect access to shared accounts, to discover privileged identities, and to manage sessions, but furthermore can actually control what users do with their privileged accounts and restrict account usage. Applications can be whitelisted or blacklisted, further enhancing control.
With this acquisition, another vendor is combining Privilege Management and Application Control, after CyberArk’s acquisition of Viewfinity some months ago. While it might be too early to name this a trend, there is logic in extending Privilege Management beyond the account management or session management aspect. Protecting not only the access to privileged accounts, but furthermore limiting and controlling the use of such accounts had already become part of Privilege Management with Session Management capabilities, but also more commonly in Unix and Linux environments with restrictions for the use of shell commands. Thus, adding Application Control and other Endpoint Security features is just a logical step.
Our view on Privilege Management always has been beyond pure Shared Account Password Management. The current evolution towards integration with Application Control and other features fits in our broader view of protecting all accounts with elevated privileges at any time, both for access and use.