CyberArk vs BeyondTrust exposes the limits of legacy PAM

At a glance

What this is: This is a PAM comparison that shows legacy privileged access tools still struggle with cloud-native breadth, lifecycle governance, and auditability.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM teams need a governance model that covers NHI, human, and hybrid access paths without turning access control into a productivity bottleneck.

By the numbers:

• Our Access-Productivity Report discovered that 64% of organizations struggle with productivity due to infrastructure access.
• Cybercrime costs businesses $10.5 trillion worth of damage globally by 2025.

👉 Read StrongDM's CyberArk vs BeyondTrust PAM comparison

Context

Privileged access management is supposed to reduce risk by controlling elevated access, but many deployments still leave gaps in onboarding, offboarding, visibility, and cloud-native coverage. In practice, that means privileged access can remain fragmented across servers, databases, Kubernetes, and remote access paths even when a team thinks PAM is already in place.

The comparison between CyberArk and BeyondTrust is really a comparison between two established PAM models and the broader question of whether classic privileged access controls are enough for modern infrastructure identity. For IAM, NHI, and platform teams, the issue is not just which tool has more features, but whether the operating model matches how access is granted, used, and revoked today.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams evaluate PAM tools for modern infrastructure?

A: Teams should evaluate whether the PAM model covers the full lifecycle of privileged access, including provisioning, session control, audit, and revocation. If a tool only protects the session but leaves onboarding or offboarding fragmented, it is not governing privilege end to end. The right question is whether access can be granted, observed, and removed consistently across databases, servers, and Kubernetes.

Q: Why do traditional PAM deployments still create risk in cloud-native environments?

A: Traditional PAM often assumes privileged access is centralized and relatively stable, while cloud-native environments spread access across many systems and workflows. That creates exceptions, duplicated credentials, and manual workarounds. When identity lives across SSO, databases, clusters, and remote tools, the control model must be broader than a vault and session recorder.

Q: What do security teams get wrong about privileged access governance?

A: They often treat PAM as the whole answer instead of one control in a wider identity programme. Privileged access can be recorded and still remain hard to revoke, hard to audit, or hard to align with joiner-mover-leaver processes. Good governance focuses on whether access is temporary, traceable, and removable without exception paths.

Q: What is the difference between PAM and zero trust access control?

A: PAM focuses on governing elevated access, usually by brokering credentials and recording sessions. Zero trust is a broader model that assumes every access request must be continuously evaluated, regardless of location or network trust. In practice, PAM can be one mechanism inside zero trust, but it does not replace the need for continuous authorization.

Technical breakdown

Legacy PAM and the privileged account boundary

Traditional PAM was built around the idea that privileged access is a special class of access that can be vaulted, brokered, and recorded. That model works best when the protected assets are clearly defined and the privileged user is the primary subject of control. The problem appears when access spans databases, cloud consoles, clusters, SSH, RDP, and service workflows at the same time. Then the boundary is no longer just a vault, it becomes a control plane question about how identity, session control, and audit evidence connect across environments.

Practical implication: map where privileged access is still handled as isolated admin access and where it now behaves like an infrastructure-wide identity problem.

Credential hiding, session logging, and audit evidence

A common PAM pattern is to hide credentials from the end user while logging sessions and commands for later review. That improves traceability, but only if the logs are complete, actionable, and tied to the actual decision path that granted access. If onboarding, offboarding, or third-party access still depends on manual steps, the evidence trail may look better than the underlying governance. In other words, auditability without lifecycle discipline can mask stale entitlements rather than remove them.

Practical implication: test whether your audit trail covers the full access lifecycle, not just the session after access has already been granted.

PAM, zero trust, and cloud-native access control

Zero trust changes the question from where a user sits on the network to whether access should exist at all for this request, this resource, and this moment. PAM products that integrate with SSO and hide credentials move in that direction, but the architectural challenge remains broader: databases, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps flows need access governance that is continuous rather than static. Once infrastructure teams start treating access as ephemeral and resource-specific, classical PAM features alone stop being the full answer.

Practical implication: evaluate whether your access model can support ephemeral, resource-specific control across modern infrastructure without requiring separate manual workflows for each system.

Breaches seen in the wild

• BeyondTrust API key breach — compromised BeyondTrust API key led to unauthorized SaaS access.
• MongoBleed breach — MongoBleed exposed secrets across 87K MongoDB servers.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Traditional PAM often solves the session problem while leaving the lifecycle problem intact. Vaulting, proxying, and session recording can reduce exposure during use, but they do not automatically solve joiner-mover-leaver governance, third-party revocation, or entitlement drift. The article’s own framing shows that onboarding and offboarding remain hard because access often lives in multiple places at once. Practitioners should treat PAM as one control layer, not the governance model itself.

Infrastructure access is now a productivity and security control problem at the same time. The StrongDM article cites 64% of organizations struggling with productivity because of infrastructure access friction, which is a useful reminder that access controls fail when they become impossible to operate cleanly. IAM teams that overcomplicate privileged access create shadow workarounds, credential sharing, and delay. The real test is whether controls reduce risk without pushing users toward exceptions.

Identity blast radius: the operational damage from one privileged path now spreads across databases, clusters, and remote sessions instead of staying inside a single admin tool. That is why a narrow PAM implementation can look compliant while still leaving broad attack surface in practice. The field needs to think less about feature checklists and more about whether a control plane can shrink the blast radius of privileged identity across the full infrastructure stack. Practitioners should judge PAM by containment, not packaging.

Lifecycle governance is the hidden differentiator in PAM maturity. The article highlights that offboarding, credential revocation, and audit reporting are not just support functions, they are the mechanisms that decide whether privileged access is temporary or persistent. That is the same governance lesson NHI teams already apply to service accounts and tokens. Practitioners should align PAM, NHI, and access review processes so revocation is a design property, not a manual afterthought.

From our research:

• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time.
• The Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs shows how lifecycle controls reduce the persistence of over-privilege.

What this signals

Identity blast radius is now the right way to think about PAM scope, because the control failure is no longer just stolen credentials but the breadth of systems those credentials can reach. Teams that still separate database, server, and cluster privilege into different governance silos will keep recreating the same exposure pattern in different tools.

With 97% of NHIs carrying excessive privileges, per the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, privilege sprawl is already the default condition in machine access programmes. The practical response is to align PAM with lifecycle governance, not just with session controls.

Security leaders should watch for a shift from product comparison to operating-model comparison. The question is no longer which tool has the nicer interface, but whether the programme can prove least privilege, revocation, and auditability across hybrid access paths without forcing users into exceptions.

For practitioners

• Map privileged access paths end to end Inventory where privileged credentials, session brokers, and access approvals live across databases, servers, Kubernetes, and remote access tooling. Identify any path that still depends on separate manual provisioning or credential sharing.
• Test offboarding as a control, not a task Suspend the primary SSO or directory binding and confirm that server access, database access, and remote administration access all stop together. If any privilege remains, the lifecycle model is fragmented.
• Measure whether session logs are actionable Review whether audit records include the privileged user, target system, command activity, and authorization context needed for an investigation. Logs that cannot answer those questions are reporting, not evidence.
• Re-evaluate PAM scope for cloud-native systems Check whether your privileged access model can cover Kubernetes and other modern resources without breaking into separate exceptions, add-ons, or tool-specific processes. Where it cannot, treat the gap as an architecture issue.

Key takeaways

• Legacy PAM can reduce session risk without solving lifecycle fragmentation across modern infrastructure.
• The evidence in this comparison points to a larger governance issue: access friction often becomes both a security gap and a productivity cost.
• IAM teams should judge PAM by revocation, audit quality, and coverage across cloud-native systems, not by vaulting alone.

Key terms

• Privileged access management: Privileged access management is the discipline for controlling high-risk access to sensitive systems, credentials, and administrative functions. In practice it governs how elevated access is granted, observed, limited, and revoked, so that admin power does not become permanent or invisible.
• Identity blast radius: Identity blast radius is the amount of damage a single account or credential can cause once it is compromised or misused. The wider the blast radius, the more systems, data, and actions are reachable from one privileged path, which makes containment and revocation more important than raw access volume.
• Joiner-mover-leaver governance: Joiner-mover-leaver governance is the process of creating, adjusting, and removing access as people or systems change state. For privileged access, it is the difference between temporary authority and lingering entitlement, and it becomes even more critical when access spans multiple infrastructure layers.
• Session logging: Session logging captures activity performed during an access session, such as commands, queries, or remote actions. It supports investigation and accountability, but it only works as a control when the logs are complete, contextual, and connected to the approval and revocation workflow.

Deepen your knowledge

Privileged access governance and lifecycle control are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are working through PAM scope in a hybrid environment, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by StrongDM: CyberArk vs. BeyondTrust: Which PAM Solution is Better? Read the original.