The biggest risk to your organization’s security might be lurking inside your perimeter. That’s why selecting the right user activity monitoring (UAM) solution can make the difference between catching early signs of a threat or suffering damaging security incidents. In this article, we’ll review the features you must demand from an effective UAM tool to secure your organization from within.
Key takeaways:
- UAM solutions track user activity within an organization’s digital environment.
- UAM tools can help you improve incident response, data protection, compliance, supply chain security, and more.
- Businesses implementing UAM may face challenges such as employee resistance, incompatibility with the existing IT ecosystem, or alert fatigue. The right UAM solution can make all the difference.
- When choosing a UAM solution, don’t focus solely on basic functionalities; you should also consider ease of deployment, scalability, and privacy safeguards.
- Syteca combines robust UAM with ease of use, delivering strong security and helping achieve compliance without increasing the workload for your IT personnel.
Why do you need a UAM solution?
According to NIST, user activity monitoring is “the technical capability to observe and record the actions and activities of an individual, at any time, on any device.” The use of UAM solutions can be beneficial for businesses in many ways.
Insider threat prevention
User activity monitoring software for enterprises helps you monitor and manage insider risks. Since insiders often have legitimate access to an organization’s most sensitive assets, they introduce significant security risks. Malicious insiders may want to steal your organization’s intellectual property or sabotage its systems, while negligent users may cause security breaches by mistake.
According to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by the Ponemon Institute, the total number of insider incidents grew to 7,868 in 2024 — up from 7,343 in 2023. By continuously monitoring users’ actions, you can catch early warning signs of an insider-driven security incident and respond before significant damage occurs.
Data protection
Protecting sensitive data is a top priority for organizations, and UAM is the cornerstone of a strong data security program. According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, 60% of breaches involve a human element. In other words, employees or their accounts are frequently the gateway to data breaches.
A UAM solution helps you protect your organization against data leaks by monitoring users’ interactions with confidential files, databases, and customer information. If, for example, an employee suddenly accesses a large volume of sensitive records or attempts to copy data to an external USB device, UAM tools can alert your security team or automatically block the suspicious actions.
Third-party access security
Many organizations rely heavily on numerous third-party contractors and vendors who often have access to internal systems or data. This introduces significant risks, as 30% of breaches involve a third party, according to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report.
Attackers increasingly target smaller vendors as a weak link to infiltrate larger organizations and their sensitive data. UAM solutions help you mitigate these risks by closely monitoring the activity of contractors and partners with access to your systems.
Streamlined compliance
In highly regulated industries, user activity monitoring is not just optional — it’s mandatory. Regulations, laws, and standards like PCI DSS and HIPAA explicitly require organizations to track and audit users who access sensitive systems.
Failing to meet these requirements can result in severe penalties. For instance, HIPAA violations can result in huge fines or even imprisonment. UAM solutions can help your organization demonstrate compliance by providing a tamper-proof audit trail of who is doing what with regulated data. They make it easier to prove to auditors that only authorized individuals have accessed sensitive information and that all required monitoring is in place.
Effective incident response and forensics
When a security incident occurs, rapid incident response is crucial for containing damage. UAM solutions can help you respond more quickly and prevent threats from escalating. In turn, detailed user activity logs are essential for forensic investigations. They can help you unravel exactly how an incident happened, which is crucial for recovering systems and learning from the incident.
UAM solutions enable you to automate or accelerate incident response actions as well as capture and store comprehensive logs for thorough analysis of even long-term incidents.
Improved productivity
Many organizations deploy user monitoring solutions to ensure that company resources are used appropriately. For instance, if employees are spending time on social media during work hours, managers can be alerted and take corrective action.
UAM solutions typically provide alerts that help you identify situations where employees violate your policies and access websites or apps unrelated to their work responsibilities.
With vs. without UAM
- Suspicious activity is detected early, helping stop breaches before they escalate.
- Every interaction with sensitive data is tracked, reducing the risk of leaks or theft.
- There is complete control over external users with clear visibility into their activities.
- Audit-ready reports and dashboards simplify regulatory compliance.
- Detailed recordings and logs lead to more efficient investigations and response measures.
- Insights into workflows reveal bottlenecks and support better productivity management.
- Risky user actions are discovered only after damage has been done.
- Unauthorized access to sensitive data goes unnoticed until it’s too late.
- Without proper oversight, contractors and partners may be misusing their privileges.
- Compliance audits are time-consuming and incomplete, with gaps in reporting.
- Scattered logs make it difficult to reconstruct incidents.
- Employees’ non-work-related and inefficient activity often goes unnoticed.
It’s clear that deploying a UAM solution is essential. But with so many options, it can be challenging to figure out how to select an effective UAM platform.
Why selecting the right UAM solution isn’t easy
Many organizations now use some form of user activity monitoring technology. According to the 2025 Insider Risk Report by Cybersecurity Insiders, 74% of organizations monitor email and communication channels, 69% monitor privileged user activity, 61% analyze user behavior, and 57% oversee physical security. This has created a boom in the UAM solutions market.
As a result, the market is overcrowded and competitive. For organizations comparing UAM solutions to find the perfect fit, this oversaturated market requires investing more time and effort to research and evaluate UAM tools.
The features and capabilities of UAM solutions differ. Some tools focus on employee productivity, while others provide security analytics or a combination of both.
You might know exactly what capabilities you need, yet a single UAM product rarely covers all of them adequately. Organizations often take a lot of time deciding between multiple tools, and sometimes even accept trade-offs in functionality.
Because of this, it’s crucial to know which capabilities you simply can’t compromise on. Identifying the must-have features in a UAM solution will help ensure you’re making a choice that delivers long-term value for your business.
10 must-have features in UAM solutions
In this section, we review the essential UAM features you’ll need to build a strong foundation for your organization’s security and protection against insider risks.
Activity logging
Robust activity logging is critical for effective UAM. UAM solutions must provide a detailed record of all user activity, including apps used, web pages visited, commands entered, and, in some cases, even keystrokes typed.
Real-time monitoring
Real-time monitoring gives your security team immediate visibility into user activity within your IT environment. Unlike post-event reviews, real-time monitoring enables security officers to observe high-risk events in real-time, allowing them to intervene right away when a security threat arises.
Screen recording
Screen recording provides a visual trail of user sessions, complementing activity logs with context. Recorded on-screen activity makes it easier for your security teams to understand users’ true intentions, investigate security incidents, and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements.
Data privacy protection
Privacy by design is essential for a UAM solution to ensure that monitoring doesn’t intrude on employees’ and vendors’ personal lives and doesn’t put your customers’ data at risk. Capabilities such as sensitive data masking, pseudonymization, and mechanisms to customize the scope of monitoring enable you to collect only necessary information, thus protecting user privacy and sensitive data.
Privileged user monitoring
Privileged accounts pose the highest cybersecurity risk to your organization. Enhanced monitoring of users with privileged access permissions, such as administrators, database operators, or developers, can help you detect early signs of account compromise or malicious intent and prevent privilege misuse.
Third-party access monitoring
Breaches originate not only from employees but often from trusted third parties. Contractors and vendors frequently work remotely or on shared systems, increasing your attack surface. A UAM solution must offer monitoring features to track the activity of these users, ensuring the same depth of oversight as for internal staff.
Alerts
Timely alerts are essential for detecting suspicious activity before it causes damage. A strong UAM platform provides real-time notifications of unusual user actions, enabling your security team to stay ahead of threats.
Incident response
UAM solutions should support automated response actions so your teams can contain and neutralize cybersecurity threats promptly. This helps you prevent or minimize the negative impact of security incidents on your business operations.
File and data activity monitoring
UAM solutions should provide data activity monitoring or easily integrate with data loss protection (DLP) platforms. This lets you track how employees or vendors use information and share it via apps or USB devices. Keeping an eye on the flow of data helps you reduce the risk of a data leak or breach.
User activity reporting
Quality UAM solutions must provide visual dashboards to simplify user activity audits. They help security teams, managers, and auditors track risks at a glance. They should also be able to generate reports ad hoc and by schedule, and export them in convenient formats for further investigation.
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A robust feature set is essential, but even the most complete set of user activity monitoring tools doesn’t guarantee easy implementation.
Key challenges in implementing UAM and how to solve them
Anticipating key implementation challenges is useful for UAM software comparisons. It helps you see the challenges you’re most likely to face and select a UAM solution that can effectively address them. Next, we review the most common challenges and outline solutions to ensure a smoother adoption process.
Poor compatibility with the existing IT infrastructure
Integrating UAM software into an existing IT environment can be a significant setback, especially if your organization uses legacy systems, cloud environments, and third-party integrations. Many UAM tools aren’t designed to support outdated platforms or custom in-house applications, which can create monitoring gaps.
Solution:
Choose a UAM solution that operates seamlessly in cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments and offers full coverage across any digital infrastructure, including legacy and custom systems.
Resistance from employees
Employees, vendors, and other users may be critical of user activity monitoring due to privacy and autonomy concerns. Users’ negative perceptions of monitoring can lead to distrust, lower morale, and even deliberate attempts to bypass monitoring systems. Without transparent communication, you risk creating a hostile environment that undermines both productivity and security.
Solution:
Ensure the monitoring you do is ethical by limiting its scope. Be transparent about the monitoring process and clearly communicate its purpose to employees. Explain that you’re implementing UAM to protect both the organization and employees from security risks. Select a solution that enables pseudonymization of user data, replacing personal identifiers with aliases during monitoring.
Large-scale data collection and storage
Organizations often underestimate the amount of data collected during monitoring. Terabytes of logs, screen captures, and file activity records can quickly fill storage systems. Beyond that, you must secure the collected data. Hence, you must not only invest in storage but also in data lifecycle management processes to avoid legal risks.
Solution:
Opt for a UAM solution with data storage optimization features. Data compression, archiving, encryption, and role-based access controls help manage storage efficiently and protect collected information.
High upfront and ongoing costs
Implementing UAM often demands more than just purchasing licenses. You must also allocate finances for deployment services, custom integrations, and staff training. These expenses, combined with ongoing maintenance, can make UAM a costly initiative that strains limited security budgets.
Solution:
Select a UAM platform built for easy deployment and low maintenance to minimize the burden on IT teams. Additionally, look for a UAM solution with flexible licensing that allows you to pay only for the features your organization truly needs.
Alert fatigue
Some UAM tools may generate excessive alerts, overwhelming your security and IT teams with notifications, many of which can be false positives. This may cause analysts to miss true threats or respond too slowly, making the monitoring process ineffective.
Solution:
Adopt a UAM tool equipped with risk-based alert prioritization, automated response actions, and user behavior baselines.
Scalability limitations
As your organization grows, your monitoring needs will also increase accordingly. However, not every UAM platform is built to scale with enterprise demands. If a UAM system cannot handle increasing data volumes or user sessions, it becomes a bottleneck for your security teams rather than a safeguard for sensitive assets.
Solution:
Choose a UAM solution designed with scalability in mind. Prioritize cloud-ready architecture, load distribution capability, and multi-tenancy support.
The Syteca platform is designed to help you overcome these challenges.
Monitoring user activity with Syteca
Syteca UAM empowers organizations of all sizes, from growing SMBs to global enterprises, to gain clear visibility into user activity. By helping you track day-to-day activity across your systems, Syteca enables you to detect potential insider risks before they turn into costly cybersecurity incidents.
Comprehensive user activity logging
- Capture detailed metadata such as login times, applications used, URLs visited, and names of windows opened to gain context.
- Record keystrokes in high-risk applications to reveal suspicious commands or unauthorized data entry.
- Control USB device connections to detect unauthorized data transfers or malware execution attempts.
- Search through logs to quickly find specific actions and efficiently audit user activity.
On-screen activity recording
- Record user sessions on video with interval snapshots or continuous full-motion capture.
- View user sessions in real time for immediate oversight and intervention.
- Limit session recording to specific apps, systems, or timeframes to minimize unnecessary monitored data.
- Mask sensitive data like credentials, credit card details, and SSNs in real-time to prevent exposure when viewing live sessions and reviewing session recordings.
- Pseudonymize users’ personally identifiable information with aliases to avoid accidental exposure, while preserving the ability to reveal details for investigation purposes.
Alerts and incident response
- Generate 30+ types of ready-to-use reports, ad-hoc or on schedule, to complement your internal and compliance audits.
- Quickly identify productivity trends, anomalies, and high-risk users through interactive dashboards with visual summaries of user activity.
- Integrate Syteca with Microsoft Power BI for advanced data visualization and analytics.
- Export reports and whole user sessions for external investigations or regulatory bodies.
In addition to user activity monitoring, Syteca also provides privileged access management (PAM) capabilities. Syteca PAM can help you discover hidden or unmanaged privileged accounts, securely store and rotate credentials, and provide granular access to ensure users receive only the necessary permissions for their roles.
Strengthen your security with the right UAM solution
Adopting a UAM solution shouldn’t add complexity. With the right features and implementation strategy, your organization can achieve stronger security, smoother compliance, and long-term value from user activity monitoring. Syteca makes it possible with a UAM solution that’s both powerful and easy to adopt.
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