Case Study: Los Alamos National Laboratory achieves centralized privileged access control and compliance with BeyondTrust PowerBroker for Servers

Los Alamos Replaces sudo with PowerBroker for Servers

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a large U.S. national security research institution with over 11,000 staff, faced an audit-driven need to strengthen privileged-access controls and comply with FISMA. Their existing sudo-based approach only logged activity per machine, forcing administrators to manually collect and consolidate logs—a process that became untenable as they inherited about 200 more UNIX and Linux systems.

The lab deployed BeyondTrust PowerBroker for Servers to provide centralized authorization, granular delegation of root privileges, and automated log centralization. PowerBroker captures keystrokes, session output and replay, and produces an indelible audit trail that shows who did what, when and where—helping Los Alamos meet compliance requirements, increase IT productivity, and avoid the high TCO of retrofitting sudo.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mike Kluk

Enterprise Systems Team Lead