They often treat PAM as a specialised enterprise add-on rather than a baseline identity control. That view leaves cloud administrators, SaaS privileges, and remote access paths outside the same governance model, which weakens visibility and accountability.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Modern PAM is often misunderstood as a vault and workflow layer for a narrow set of admins, when it is really a control plane for privileged access across human and non-human identities. That mismatch matters because attackers do not care whether privilege lives in a Windows admin session, a SaaS superuser role, or an API token. NIST’s NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 treats access governance as a core security function, not a niche tool category.
At NHI Management Group, the pattern is consistent: the attack surface expands fastest where privilege is least visible. In the Ultimate Guide to Non-Human Identities, NHI Mgmt Group notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges and 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys. That is the practical reason PAM cannot stop at the data center door. If cloud consoles, CI/CD runners, and SaaS admin paths are excluded, the organisation still has privileged sprawl even if the vault is technically “working.” In practice, many security teams discover this only after an exposed token or over-permissioned admin path has already been used, rather than through intentional privilege design.
How It Works in Practice
Effective PAM should govern privileged elevation, session access, and credential use wherever control is exercised. That means extending policy beyond legacy servers to cloud IAM roles, SaaS administrative actions, break-glass access, service accounts, and API credentials. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it reinforces identity, access, and monitoring as continuous controls, not one-time approvals.
Operationally, teams should decide first what counts as privileged, then apply the same lifecycle rules across environments:
- Use least privilege for human admins, service accounts, and machine-to-machine credentials.
- Require just-in-time elevation for high-risk actions instead of standing admin membership.
- Record sessions and API activity where technically feasible, especially for production and financial systems.
- Rotate secrets and revoke unused privileges on a fixed schedule, not only during audits.
- Separate approval for role assignment from approval for time-bound execution.
This is where the BeyondTrust API key breach is instructive: compromised privileged credentials can become a full control-plane incident when the access path is not governed like other admin routes. The Ultimate Guide to Non-Human Identities also highlights how rarely organisations have full visibility into service accounts, which is why PAM programmes that exclude non-human privilege miss the most difficult inventory problem. These controls tend to break down in multi-cloud environments with fragmented identity ownership because no single team can see or enforce privilege consistently across all platforms.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter PAM often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance stronger control against developer velocity, support burden, and emergency access needs. That tradeoff is real, especially in environments where release pipelines, third-party support, and business-critical SaaS administration all need elevated access.
Current guidance suggests that PAM should be adapted to the privilege pattern, not the technology label. For example, a database admin account and a CI/CD deploy token are both privileged, but they need different controls, different approvals, and different audit evidence. There is no universal standard for this yet, but best practice is evolving toward policy-based privilege decisions, short-lived access, and explicit ownership for every privileged identity.
Common failure points include treating vendor remote support as “temporary” without strong session recording, allowing shared admin accounts in SaaS, and assuming that vaulting a secret equals governing the privilege behind it. A stronger model aligns PAM with broader identity governance so that privileged access is reviewed across human admins, machine identities, and automation accounts together. In practice, the hardest gap is not the vault itself but the untracked privilege that never entered the vault in the first place.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Covers weak lifecycle control over privileged non-human credentials. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Supports least-privilege access management across privileged pathways. |
| NIST AI RMF | Useful for governing adaptive, automated privilege decisions in AI-enabled environments. |
Map all admin and service privileges to a single access review process and remove standing excess rights.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
