Elevating Cybersecurity with NCSC’s Privileged Access Workstations Guidance

In a world where digital ecosystems are rapidly expanding—and with it the cyber threat landscape—the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has published a guide: “Principles for Secure Privileged Access Workstations (PAWs)”.

This guidance is tailored for organisations with high-risk system administration needs, providing clear principles for the secure setup and management of PAWs—dedicated, hardened devices used exclusively for privileged activities like infrastructure administration and sensitive access tasks.

8 priciples:

✅ Establishing a PAW Strategy – Customised to your organisation’s risk profile, aligning security with operational needs.

✅ Usability vs. Security – Designing PAWs to strike a balance between secure configurations and administrator usability.

✅ Foundation of Trust – Starting from trusted builds, supply chains, and installation procedures.

✅ Reducing theAttackSurface – Minimising unnecessary functionality, access to the web, or apps that can expose systems to compromise.

✅ Activity Isolation – Keeping privileged activities on isolated environments to prevent lateral movement from compromised endpoints.

✅ Protective Monitoring – Deploying mechanisms to detect, log, and respond to suspicious or malicious PAW usage.

✅ Controlled Data Flows – Ensuring tight control over what data enters or leaves the PAW environment to prevent leakage.

This guide is also particularly valuable for Managed Service Providers, outsourcing firms, and any organisation that must manage privileged access across supply chains, development environments, or internal teams.

Lately, I've been heavily involved in SOC2 and ISO 27001 audit projects with body leasing companies or those providing outsourced staffing—whether for infrastructure management or software development. Sometimes clients provide the devices themselves (which is great—those are hardened and secured via MDM), but often, devices come from the provider side, introducing substantial risks for both parties.

That’s why I find this guidance from the NCSC highly valuable. It's not just for service organisations—it’s a best-practice roadmap for any company serious about its cybersecurity maturity. These principles help operationalise security for privilegedaccess in a way that’s tangible and implementable.

Link to the full guidance

Author: Sebastian Burgemejster