Topic starter
16/01/2026 1:18 pm
TL;DR: Mature PAM deployments still miss orphaned accounts, cross-domain privilege paths, and short-lived machine identities, leaving blind spots that attackers can exploit across hybrid and cloud estates, according to Hydden. The real issue is not vaulting credentials but governing identity relationships, lifecycle, and observability before privilege becomes invisible.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Hydden: “The Identity System of Record”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when mature PAM does not have full identity visibility?
A: Mature PAM breaks when it can control sessions but cannot see the identities, relationships, and inherited entitlements that create those sessions.
Q: Why do hidden privilege paths increase hybrid estate risk?
A: Hidden privilege paths increase risk because attackers can move through inherited entitlements across directory services, cloud IAM, and orchestration systems without needing a direct admin login.
Q: What are the signs that machine identity governance is no longer keeping up?
A: Common signs include surprise certificate expirations, repeated manual renewals, inconsistent policy enforcement, and teams that cannot answer who owns a given key or trust anchor.
Practitioner guidance
- Map the full identity graph Continuously discover relationships between users, service accounts, cloud roles, and pipeline identities so privilege paths can be traced end to end.
- Inventory non-human identities Build and maintain a complete inventory of service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates, including ownership and workload dependency.
- Normalise privilege across platforms Translate on-premises, cloud, and SaaS entitlements into a consistent privilege model so inherited access and delegated rights are visible.
Bottom line: Mature PAM can still miss the real attack surface when identity relationships, delegated rights, and inherited privilege are not continuously visible.
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11/10/2026 1:36 am
Visibility is now the primary PAM control plane: Mature PAM is only as strong as the identity graph behind it. When organisations cannot continuously discover accounts, privileges, and relationships across domains, the vault becomes a local control sitting on top of a global blind spot. The practitioner conclusion is that observability has become a governance function, not a monitoring add-on.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 73% of vaults are misconfigured, leading to unauthorised access and exposure of sensitive data, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should security teams enforce privileged access in hybrid environments?
A: Security teams should enforce privileged access as a runtime decision, not just as a stored credential problem. That means binding policy to authentication and action time, then checking whether the same control path applies across cloud, SaaS, automation, and AI-driven identities. If a privilege can be used without a policy decision at the moment of use, the programme still depends on visibility rather than enforcement.
👉 Read our full editorial: Visibility gaps are weakening mature PAM in hybrid enterprises