Topic starter
25/06/2026 5:16 pm
TL;DR: Akeyless argues that legacy PAM models built on vaults, appliances, and standing credentials are struggling to match cloud-native, API-driven environments, and that modern PAM must unify secrets, access, and encryption through ephemeral credentials and Zero-Knowledge controls. Static privilege is no longer the governance center of gravity; lifecycle control at issuance and session time is.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Akeyless: “Akeyless vs. BeyondTrust: Modernizing PAM for the Cloud Era”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when PAM depends on proxies or vaults in multi-cloud production environments?
A: PAM breaks down when it cannot enforce access natively in each system and instead depends on proxies or vaults as an extra control layer.
Q: When should organisations prioritise just-in-time admin access over permanent privilege?
A: Organisations should prioritise just-in-time admin access when elevated rights are not needed continuously and when compromise of standing privilege would create unacceptable blast radius.
Q: What are the signs that infrastructure access governance is too fragmented?
A: Signs include duplicate access reviews, inconsistent answers to who accessed what, separate audit trails for PAM and NHI, and slow investigations when root-level permissions are involved.
Practitioner guidance
- Map standing privilege dependencies Inventory where privileged access still depends on stored credentials, appliance-mediated session brokering, or manual rotation.
- Shift high-risk access to just-in-time issuance Use time-bound credentials for administrative sessions, database access, and workload operations where the task duration is predictable.
- Unify secrets and access governance Assess whether secrets management, remote access, and encryption are governed by the same policy model or by separate modules that drift over time.
Bottom line: The article frames modern PAM as a governance shift away from appliance-heavy vaulting and toward short-lived, session-bound access.
What's in the full article
Akeyless' full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source: how its PAM model is positioned against BeyondTrust across deployment, credential handling, and control-plane design.
- Comparison table details on deployment model, protocol coverage, and compliance features.
- Description of how ephemeral SSH, RDP, and database credentials are issued and expire after use.
- Explanation of the zero-knowledge architecture and Distributed Fragments Cryptography model.
- Notes on hybrid and multi-cloud integrations, including identity federation and SIEM logging.
👉 Read Akeyless' analysis of BeyondTrust alternatives and modern PAM governance →
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25/06/2026 5:51 pm
Modern PAM is becoming a lifecycle problem, not a vaulting problem. The real issue in hybrid estates is no longer just where credentials are stored. It is whether access can be issued, used, and removed fast enough to match cloud-native operations, machine identities, and remote administration. Governance models built around static vaults treat privilege as something that persists long enough to be managed after the fact. Practitioners should recognise that the control point has moved to access creation and expiry.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 36% of health IT leaders say their organisation applies a privileged access strategy consistently across the enterprise, according to Ponemon Institute research.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What do security teams get wrong about zero-knowledge PAM?
A: Teams often treat zero-knowledge as a product label instead of a trust-boundary property. The real test is whether the platform can ever reconstruct customer secrets or keys during administration, support, or recovery. If it can, the governance model still concentrates trust.
👉 Read our full editorial: BeyondTrust alternatives expose the shift to modern PAM governance