Beyond PAM: Why Privilege Management Must Evolve for Modern Identity Security

Read full article here: https://www.sailpoint.com/blog/privilege-security-posture-management/?utm_source=nhimg

For decades, “privileged access” has been treated as an infrastructure problem. Security teams built walls around IT environments, workstations, and cloud platforms using tools like Privileged Access Management (PAM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM).

These controls remain important—but they’re no longer enough. Business applications have quietly become one of the largest sources of privilege risk, yet they remain a blind spot for most organizations.

The reality is messy:

• Entitlements and roles accumulate endlessly.
• Some are critical, some are unnecessary, many are forgotten.
• Few organizations can say with confidence which accounts are truly privileged.

This blurring of boundaries makes it nearly impossible to enforce least privilege. How do you protect what you can’t clearly define? And if your tools only cover fragments of the identity landscape, can you really claim to have privilege under control?

What’s Getting in the Way

The biggest barrier is business application entitlements. These are sprawling, complex, and often poorly documented. With hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of entitlements in large enterprises, trying to manually determine which ones are privileged is a Herculean task.

Let’s put numbers to it:

• On average, it takes 3 minutes to review a single entitlement.
• At 500,000 entitlements, that’s nearly 3 years of nonstop effort—just for discovery.
• By the time you finish, your environment has already changed, and the cycle starts over again.

This endless churn is why many organizations never achieve least privilege in practice. The effort required outpaces human capacity.

Introducing a Better Way

At SailPoint, we believe privilege security needs a fundamental shift. Identity is now the foundation of enterprise security, and privilege must be reframed through that lens.

We’re introducing a new discipline:

Privilege Security Posture Management (PSPM)

PSPM goes beyond traditional tools by unifying automated discovery, contextual understanding, and real-time enforcement across all identities—not just a subset tied to infrastructure.

This approach helps organizations:

• Uncover privilege everywhere: Automated discovery classifies privileged entitlements across infrastructure, SaaS apps, and business-critical systems.
• Understand usage and context: Our identity graph reveals how privilege is obtained, inherited, and actually used—cutting through noise to highlight real risks.
• Act in real time: From Just-in-Time access to continuous validation and alerts, PSPM ensures privilege is tightly governed and abuse is detected immediately.

The outcome is a foundation where least privilege and Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) are not aspirational—they’re practical.

How Privilege Security Posture Management Delivers

PSPM enables organizations to:

• Discovery & Classification – Automatically identify privileged entitlements and categorize them by sensitivity and access level.
• Privilege Insights – Visualize inheritance, effective privileges, and access pathways for transparency at scale.
• Risk Analysis – Combine identity context, privilege type, and method of access to prioritize mitigation.
• Just-in-Time Access – Provide temporary privilege only when needed, minimizing standing risk.
• Governance – Continuously certify, validate, and control privilege changes in line with compliance needs.
• Alert & Respond – Monitor active privileged sessions, trigger alerts on anomalies, and automate remediation workflows.

Why This Matters Now

The perimeter is gone. Workflows live in SaaS. AI agents and machine identities are exploding. Business applications are as critical as servers. Privilege today extends far beyond what legacy PAM was designed to handle.

Privilege Security Posture Management closes this gap. It reframes privilege not as a siloed infrastructure issue but as an identity-first discipline that applies across the full enterprise fabric.

By making privilege transparent, governable, and enforceable in real time, organizations can finally achieve:

• Reduced breach risk from over-privileged accounts
• Greater agility through JIT and automation
• True least privilege in practice, not theory

The Road Ahead

Privilege has always been a double-edged sword—essential for operations, dangerous when uncontrolled. In today’s identity-first world, the old approaches no longer suffice.

Privilege Security Posture Management is more than a concept—it’s a new standard for how privilege must be managed in the age of identity security.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore each PSPM capability—discovery, insights, risk analysis, JIT, governance, and response—to show how organizations can finally bring privilege out of the shadows and into a modern, secure, identity-driven framework.

Because in the end, privilege isn’t just about systems—it’s about trust.