Topic starter
05/10/2026 6:49 pm
TL;DR: Venice.io explains that traditional PAM vaults credentials but leaves standing privilege intact, while modern PAM grants just-in-time access across people, service accounts, and AI agents, reducing the blast radius when powerful access is misused or stolen. The governance shift is from protecting passwords to eliminating persistent authority.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Venice.io: “Privileged Access Management: What it is and how modern PAM is different in 2027”.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when privileged access is not continuously governed?
A: When privileged access is not continuously governed, standing privilege persists, dormant accounts remain usable, and the attack surface expands across human and machine identities.
Q: Why do privileged credentials create more risk than standard employee passwords?
A: Privileged credentials can unlock broad access across systems, so compromise often leads to lateral movement, deeper persistence, and faster escalation.
Q: How do security teams know whether PAM is actually reducing privilege risk?
A: Measure how much privileged access is permanent, how often elevation is task-scoped, and whether session activity matches the approved purpose.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every privileged identity Map human admins, service accounts, cloud roles, application credentials, and AI agents that can change systems or other access paths.
- Remove standing privilege from the highest-risk accounts Prioritise domain admins, production database owners, and roles that can edit other roles.
- Separate credential protection from entitlement governance Treat vaulting, rotation, and key injection as controls for the secret, but also review the privilege behind the secret.
What's in the full article
Venice.io's full guide covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step explanations of how discovery, vaulting, rotation, and key injection fit together in a PAM programme
- The side-by-side comparison of traditional PAM and modern PAM across human admins, service accounts, cloud roles, and AI agents
- The operational sequence for moving from permanent roles to just-in-time access without breaking production workflows
- The practical examples of how access requests, session monitoring, and audit reporting are handled across environments
👉 Read Venice.io's guide to modern PAM and zero standing privilege →
PAM and zero standing privilege: what modern teams need to know?
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05/10/2026 6:49 pm
Standing privilege is the control failure modern PAM is really trying to eliminate: vaulting credentials without removing the underlying entitlement preserves the attacker’s prize. That distinction matters because the risk is not only secret theft, but durable authority that remains usable after the original task is over. Practitioners should treat persistent privilege as the real governance defect, not credential storage alone.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should security teams govern privileged access across service accounts and AI-driven systems?
A: Security teams should govern privileged access by focusing on the actions an identity can perform, not only on the account it uses. That means short-lived credentials, task-scoped permissions, clear ownership, and real-time policy decisions. Without those controls, service accounts and AI-driven systems accumulate standing privilege that is difficult to review or safely revoke.
👉 Read our full editorial: Modern pam shifts from vaulting credentials to zero standing