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25/06/2026 3:15 pm
TL;DR: Privileged access management concentrates on the accounts attackers target first, including admins, root users, and service accounts, while reducing standing privilege through vaulting, just-in-time access, session monitoring, and reviews, according to SecurEnds. The core issue is not tooling breadth alone but whether privileged access is actually constrained, observed, and auditable before a breach or audit failure occurs.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SecurEnds: Modern Privileged Access Management
Questions worth separating out
Q: What fails when privileged access stays permanently enabled?
A: Standing privileged access creates a long abuse window, weakens accountability, and makes audit evidence stale before anyone reviews it.
Q: Why do service accounts increase privileged access risk?
A: Service accounts often hold elevated permissions, run unattended, and escape the review processes used for human users.
Q: How do security teams know if PAM is actually working?
A: Look for evidence that elevated rights are short-lived, session activity is logged, and access reviews result in real removals rather than paperwork.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every privileged identity Build a current register of human admins, service accounts, cloud superusers, and vendor accounts.
- Convert standing privilege into JIT access Replace always-on administrative rights with time-bound access requests, explicit approvals, and automatic expiry.
- Monitor privileged sessions end to end Record commands, configuration changes, and session metadata for every elevated login.
What's in the full article
SecurEnds' full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How its PAM workflow handles vaulting, approval, and automatic expiry for elevated access.
- How the platform connects access certifications with emergency break-glass processes for admin accounts.
- How session monitoring, reporting, and integrations are wired across AD, Azure AD, Okta, AWS, and ServiceNow.
- How it frames PAM use cases across finance, healthcare, retail, and cloud operations.
👉 Read SecurEnds' analysis of modern privileged access management →
Privileged access management in the cloud era: what teams miss?
Explore further
25/06/2026 4:39 pm
Privileged access is now an identity governance problem, not just a vaulting problem. The article correctly treats admins, root users, contractor accounts, and service accounts as the same risk class when they can change systems, access sensitive data, or bypass normal controls. That is the right framing for modern IAM because the real issue is entitlement scope, not login method. Organisations that stop at password storage miss the governance question: who owns the access, who approves it, and who can revoke it quickly enough?
A few things that frame the scale:
- 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which explains why privileged access often grows faster than governance can track it.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own privileged access governance?
A: Ownership should sit with the control owner closest to the risk, not only with the platform team. IAM, IGA, cloud operations, and security all have a role, but the accountable owner must be able to approve, monitor, and revoke high-risk access across human and machine identities. Without clear ownership, privileged access accumulates faster than it is removed.
👉 Read our full editorial: Modern privileged access management for cloud and service accounts
