Topic starter
06/11/2026 6:37 pm
TL;DR: Cloud complexity, feature bloat, and consultant-led implementations outpace most organisations’ ability to turn bought controls into working governance, according to Admin By Request. The real issue is not PAM itself but the gap between purchased capability and operational oversight.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Admin By Request: “PAM Complexity is a Security Problem in Itself”.
By the numbers:
- Others push that to 2,000:1 or higher.
Key questions
Q: How can teams tell whether their PAM programme is actually complete?
A: A PAM programme is complete only when it covers the resources people and vendors actually use, not just the entry protocol.
Q: Why do PAM implementations stall in large environments?
A: PAM implementations stall when account inventory, role design, and entitlement cleanup cannot keep up with the pace of change.
Q: When does shadow AI become an access governance problem?
A: Shadow AI becomes an access governance problem as soon as the agent can authenticate to enterprise systems with real credentials.
Practitioner guidance
- Audit deployed versus purchased PAM coverage List every privileged access flow the programme is meant to govern, then identify which flows actually pass through the live control set and which still rely on manual handling or exceptions.
- Reduce feature scope to what operations can own Strip out features that create training, tuning, or exception overhead unless they are required for the core privileged access workflow and can be supported by the internal team.
- Inventory privileged paths outside the vault Trace direct admin access, break-glass use, cloud console elevation, and sanctioned automation to find where privilege still bypasses the intended PAM process.
Bottom line: PAM complexity becomes a control problem when the organisation cannot fully deploy or operate the platform it bought.
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06/11/2026 6:41 pm
PAM complexity is now a governance failure mode, not a feature debate: When a privilege programme grows beyond the team’s ability to deploy and operate it, the control boundary becomes unreliable. The issue is not whether the product exists in the procurement catalogue. It is whether access handling, approvals, and auditability are actually enforced in production. Practitioners should judge PAM by operating reality, not by purchased capability.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 73% of vaults are misconfigured, leading to unauthorised access and exposure of sensitive data, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system, according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the best way to prioritise privileged access controls in cloud estates?
A: Start with the highest-risk privileged paths: cloud admin roles, root-equivalent permissions, and identities that can create or change access, networking, and secrets. Then apply least privilege, separate standing admin from JIT elevation, enforce MFA, and review service accounts and automation roles that can bypass human approval. Prioritise controls where a single compromise would expose the widest set of subscriptions, workloads, or data.
👉 Read our full editorial: PAM complexity is now a governance problem, not just a tooling one