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Overall, a majority of respondents indicated that Privileged Access Management (PAM) was important for their organization, with more than 90% of respondents indicating that PAM is important in their overall cybersecurity strategy. However, while the importance of PAM was indicated by the respondents, their real-life adoption and usage of PAM was found to be much less. Only 35% of the respondents confirmed that Privileged Access Management is being used by their organization. The remaining 65% of respondents were either testing, researching or not considering Privileged Access Management at this time.

"This onsite poll indicates that organizations in the Middle East are ignoring the risk of allowing administrative users to have privileged access without any controls. Globally, Centrify and others have found that upwards of 74% of data breaches involve privileged access abuse. What’s concerning is that we continue to find it’s not a lack of awareness, but rather a lack of action. Organizations need to prioritize Privileged Access Management as a top security project now, and do so with a modern approach founded in Zero Trust and least privilege," Kamel Heus, Regional Director, Northern, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Centrify explains.

The Centrify poll also found that while 42% of respondents are moving workloads to the cloud, only 8% understand that it is their responsibility for securing privileged access to cloud environments. The remaining respondents, either felt it was the cloud service provider’s responsibility or a shared responsibility.

"These onsite findings demonstrate a lack of understanding about the shared responsibility model when it comes to securing cloud environments. Without a correct understanding that it is their responsibility, it’s no wonder the vast majority are not using PAM solutions to secure cloud admin accounts and access to cloud workloads. Cloud is a new attack surface that must be secured. With the enhanced role of threat activity and involvement of state actors in the region, no organization can afford the costly impact of a data breach and the associated downtime of business," added Heus.

Onsite respondents were asked focused and limited number of questions to gauge their adoption of Privileged Access Management solutions and best practices, in a cloud ready environment. Close to 80 visitor respondents at GITEX 2019, participated in this onsite survey, conducted by Centrify.