WALLIX Bastion

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is positioned as a core control within access risk management and identity security because privileged accounts remain a primary path for attackers to gain entry, steal data, or damage infrastructure. Digital transformation—hybrid IT, cloud adoption, DevOps acceleration, and regulatory pressure such as GDPR—has expanded both the number of “business critical/confidential” systems and the population of humans and applications needing privileged access. This widens the attack surface and increases the need for dedicated PAM capabilities beyond traditional administrator account management. Privileged users now span IT administrators managing system, software, and service accounts, as well as business users accessing sensitive assets like HR, payroll, financial data, intellectual property, and even social media accounts.

WALLIX, a France-based cybersecurity vendor, offers PAM via WALLIX Bastion, complemented by adjacent capabilities such as IDaaS and MFA. The 2021 Bastion platform is organized into five components—Session Manager, Password Manager (Vault), Access Manager, Privilege Elevation and Delegation Manager (PEDM), and Application-to-Application Password Manager (AAPM)—and is now compatible with WALLIX BestSafe to address Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM), a need intensified by large-scale remote work. Bastion emphasizes agentless deployment and a web-based administrative interface, with robust session monitoring and recording. Enhancements include shared-session collaboration extending the four-eye principle, rapid session termination with reconnection prevention, and remote monitoring of internal privileged sessions.

Bastion integrates with SIEM and Vulnerability Management tools, supports detailed recording for both graphical and command-line sessions (including OCR-based video search), and scales via multiple appliances, centralized management, and jump servers. AAPM targets non-human access and DevOps/RPA use cases by delivering vaulted credentials via REST APIs to tools like Terraform and Ansible, reducing hard-coded secrets. Strengths include mature PSM, multi-tenancy, high availability options, and strong roadmap execution, while challenges include dated UX areas, product overlap between Access Manager and BestSafe, limited penetration outside EMEA, and a need for more native DevOps integrations.

• Privileged user groups include IT users managing infrastructure accounts and business users accessing sensitive information assets such as HR, payroll, financial data, intellectual property, and social media accounts.
• Cyber criminals have long targeted unprotected privileged accounts as an easy route to enter organizations.
• Standard PAM features commonly include credential vaulting, password rotation, controlled elevation and delegation, and session monitoring.
• WALLIX Bastion provides a web-based interface for PAM administrative functions and session monitoring/recording.
• WALLIX Bastion for 2021 includes Session Manager, Password Manager (Vault), Access Manager, PEDM, and AAPM.
• WALLIX Bastion is compatible with WALLIX BestSafe, which provides Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM).
• WALLIX Bastion modules are available as hardware or virtual appliances and support multi-tenancy for hosted and managed service providers offering PAM-as-a-Service.
• WALLIX does not offer its own PAM-as-a-Service option.
• Bastion integrates with SIEM platforms IBM QRadar, Splunk, and LogPoint, and with VM platforms Qualys, CyberWatch, and Backbox.
• Graphical sessions such as RDP or VNC can be recorded in DVR format with search via keywords, window titles, and metadata, and OCR-based translation is available for text search of video sessions.

• “Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions are critical cybersecurity controls that address the security risks associated with privileged access in organizations.”
• “Cyber criminals have long targeted unprotected privileged accounts as one of the easiest routes to get inside an organization to steal data or damage infrastructure.”
• “WALLIX Bastion continues to provide a web-based interface for all PAM administrative functions and this provides an easy to analyze overview of session monitoring and recording.”
• “The need for EPM has been brought into sharp relief by the major shift to home working triggered by the COVID-19 epidemic, which is likely to have a lasting impact on business practices.”
• “The recording functions built-in to WALLIX Bastion give organizations the opportunity to track and trace potential malicious insiders or attackers and reduce the chance of costly data breaches.”
• “OCR-based translation of video sessions is also available for text-based search of recorded video sessions.”
• “Since our last Executive View, the demand to deliver privileged access to machines, IoT and other non-human entities has increased sharply.”
• “It can be integrated into scripts or called by applications like Terraform or Ansible to extract credentials from the Bastion vault to eliminate hard-coded passwords in applications and provide credentials to DevOps tools.”
• “WALLIX BestSafe is a product in tune with the new approach to PAM, one that avoids standing privilege for users and moves towards Just in Time (JIT) issue of one-time passwords (OTP) and connects with Active Directory (AD) to define privileges.”
• “By building on its existing capabilities for password management and privileged session management (PSM) and adding enhanced EPM, AAPM and better DevOps support, WALLIX has a highly competitive level of PAM capabilities and is one that organizations should consider for their shortlist.”