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12/06/2026 9:59 pm
TL;DR: Privileged access management tools reduce risk through authentication, session monitoring, rotation, and least privilege, according to Zluri’s 2026 updated overview of PAM solutions. The hard problem is not feature coverage but whether privileged access is still treated as a standing entitlement instead of a tightly governed, revocable control surface.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Access Management Top 13 Privileged Access Management Solutions [2026 Updated]
By the numbers:
- 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce standing privilege in privileged access management?
A: Start by separating always-on administrative access from task-scoped elevation.
Q: Why do privileged accounts remain a high-risk control point for IAM teams?
A: Privileged accounts can alter systems, disable defenses, and reach sensitive data with very few steps once compromised.
Q: How do teams know whether PAM is actually reducing risk?
A: Look for evidence that privileged access is time-bound, owned, and revocable.
Practitioner guidance
- Map privileged accounts to lifecycle owners Inventory who owns every admin account, vendor account, and shared credential, then assign revocation responsibility before the next access review.
- Reduce standing privilege before adding more monitoring Remove always-on administrative access where just-in-time elevation or task-scoped access is possible.
- Verify rotation and vault controls together Check that privileged password rotation, vault permissions, and offboarding workflows all point to the same source of truth.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Side-by-side feature summaries for the listed PAM tools, including session control and password vaulting capabilities.
- Vendor-specific workflow automation examples for access requests, approvals, and revocations across privileged accounts.
- Product comparison details that help teams map tool features to their existing IAM and PAM stack.
- Customer rating snapshots and implementation-oriented notes that are useful once the shortlist phase begins.
👉 Read Zluri's overview of privileged access management tools and capabilities →
PAM tools and standing privilege: what IAM teams need to know?
Explore further
13/06/2026 12:27 am
Privileged access is no longer an admin-only problem, it is an identity governance problem. PAM controls sit at the boundary between human administrators, service credentials, and machine-to-machine access. When organisations treat them as isolated security tools, they miss the lifecycle issues that create standing privilege, orphaned credentials, and unreviewed elevation. The practitioner conclusion is that PAM has to be governed as part of the wider identity programme, not as a separate vaulting project.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when privileged access is misused?
A: Accountability should follow the identity that owns the privilege, the workflow that approved it, and the team that can revoke it. In practice, this means security, IAM, platform, and application owners all need clear responsibility boundaries. Without that, privileged misuse becomes a coordination failure instead of a governable event.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged access management still hinges on standing access control
