Modern PAM Defined: What It Is, and Why It’s Needed

Privileged Access Management (PAM) has stood as a cornerstone of cybersecurity for decades. Leading industry analysts consistently position PAM as key for organizations looking to secure privileged access, safeguard critical systems, and minimize their attack surface. PAM is also considered vital for enabling zero trust architectures and other cybersecurity frameworks.

PAM’s enduring presence at the forefront of cybersecurity defensive strategies has always depended on its ability to adapt to evolving cyber threats. In recent years, modern PAM capabilities have emerged to address critical gaps in enterprise identity security. Read on to better understand these gaps, and how modern PAM is addressing them to reduce risk, while also removing hassles for end users to help them work better.

Focusing on accounts with privileged access to systems, data, applications, and other sensitive resources has long reigned as one of the most effective ways to defend against cyber threats. However, in today’s complex and dynamic IT environments, protecting privileged access is much less straightforward.

No longer is every instance of elevated access obvious. In most environments, there are numerous planes of privilege that confer access to systems, resources, and data, either through on-premises privilege models or through roles and entitlements in cloud and SaaS systems. While organizations typically focus PAM controls almost entirely on administrative privileges that are directly assigned, the entitlements assigned to a typical, non-admin user can also be misused to cause significant harm.

With group memberships, identity misconfigurations, and overlooked cloud permissions growing more prevalent, even a seemingly low-privilege user could have a hidden or indirect path to escalate privileges. And today’s attackers are frequently exploiting these pathways rather than directly targeting privileged accounts. These potential escalation paths are multiplying as IT complexity increases, while also becoming more difficult to see and protect.

So, in one corner, we have traditional PAM, which is focused on visibility and control over assigned privileges/privileged access, but isn’t providing much visibility outside of that sphere. Then, we have other traditional identity security tools, which similarly suffer from tunnel vision with regard to their own niche areas of expertise.

Because identities and access can cross every domain, it’s essential for organizations to view identity and privilege through a holistic, cross-domain lens that cuts through silos. And organizations must be able to adeptly pivot from this visibility to exerting pinpoint control, even in highly dynamic environments.

Some of the most pressing modern identity security challenges include:

• Inadequate visibility and understanding into what is needed to improve identity security hygiene and posture

• Growing numbers of normal / non-IT users with high True Privilege™ are spread across the entire IT infrastructure (including identity estate), combining with high amounts of standing privilege to present a persistent attack surface.

• Difficulty cohesively managing and securing identities across hybrid IT environments and different domains, especially without hindering productivity.

• Attackers exploit weak or compromised credentials to gain access to privileged accounts, providing a direct path to critical systems and data.

Modern PAM steps in to address the critical identity security gaps outlined above. These solutions enable organizations to expand visibility, protection, and control beyond directly privileged accounts. Ideally, this entails providing cross-domain coverage (on-premises, cloud, SaaS, OT, etc.) over how privileges are accessed, while also accounting for true privilege, which encompasses all the entitlements and escalation pathways of an identity / identities.

In addition to providing the preventative, attack surface reduction capabilities PAM has always been known for, modern PAM should use AI and or ML-powered intelligence to proactively detect and mitigate threats. These can help position PAM as a core piece of identity threat detection and response (ITDR).

But modern PAM absolutely must be more than a security toolset. These solutions must enable admins, help desks, and end users to work more efficiently at scale. This means getting access faster, with fewer hurdles, less admin workload, and fewer help desk tickets – while maintaining a robust, identity-aware security posture.

For example, traditional PAM products struggle to operationalize just-in-time (JIT) access approaches in the cloud and SaaS environments without adding onerous workflows that degrade productivity. Modern PAM is designed for these use cases, ensuring agile, streamlined workflows that eliminate access delays, while maintaining security and auditability. The ability to seamlessly eliminate standing privileges and make JIT access practical at scale represents a game-changer for enterprise security.

While foundational PAM (PASM, PEDM, etc.) remains essential to proactive defense, modern PAM addresses unique identity security use cases and complements and enhances the strengths of more traditional solutions.

BeyondTrust’s Modern PAM was designed to eliminate friction and accelerate productivity. Here’s how:

• Addresses the True Privilege of identities – True privilege is the effective privilege of an account. It’s the level of privilege an attacker could potentially achieve if they successfully compromised that account by controlling other accounts or by abusing misconfigurations, and other privilege escalation paths. BeyondTrust is the leader in true privilege discovery, with the most comprehensive approach in the market. Our customers benefit from the most complete picture of identities--and their risk--across domains.

• Automates least privilege – Streamlines access management processes, eliminating unnecessary access (by up to 91%), and reduces time spent on provisioning tasks and implementing least privilege. Innovations like permission bundling and self-service access workflows cut the hassle and delays in access, helping users work faster and more smoothly.

• Ensures identity-secure access, anywhere – Provides secure, infrastructure-free remote access to critical systems, reducing the risk of breaches, while also eliminating traditional VPN overhead.

BeyondTrust’s Modern PAM solution is comprised of three innovative products—Identity Security Insights®, Entitle, and Privileged Remote Access. Individually, each of these products broke important new ground and set a high bar in their spaces. Working together as a cohesive solution, you can make leaps in security and productivity, fast, while confidently addressing today’s most significant identity security challenges.

BeyondTrust Identity Security Insights

Identity Security Insights provides the foundation to a modern identity security strategy. The product is key to holistically strengthening your identity security posture by reducing risks. It also helps accelerate PAM projects by providing actionable intelligence that illuminates risks and puts them in context.

Identity Security Insights helps you establish a baseline of where to start and what to prioritize to make the most impactful changes, and minimize your risk—in the shortest amount of time. The product examines identities, accounts, configurations, and permissions on endpoints, servers, databases, DevOps tools, IdPs, clouds, and SaaS solutions. By taking full advantage of our data lake and sophisticated data model, Identity Security Insights allows organizations to leverage supervised and unsupervised machine learning, which increases the accuracy and reliability of the product’s actionable recommendations and detections.

BeyondTrust Entitle

Entitle is a cloud access management solution that helps organizations seamlessly replace standing permissions with a JIT access approach, reducing the risk of unauthorized or excessive access to cloud resources. Entitle simplifies cloud permissions management by offering features like self-service access requests, no-code approval workflows, automated provisioning, and access governance.

With Entitle, granular and temporary access is granted and revoked in as little as one click, minimizing security risks. The platform enables employees to request specific access through a self-service interface, with policy-based approvals. Permissions are automatically assigned and revoked once privileges expire, improving security without disrupting productivity.

BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access

Privileged Remote Access enables IT teams to deliver secure, frictionless access to critical systems like servers, databases, and operational tech—without VPNs, persistent credentials, or complex setups. By simplifying access management with automation, and by enforcing zero trust principles, the product accelerates productivity while strengthening security.

Privileged Remote Access eliminates the risks inherent in VPNs and RDP, delivering seamless, JIT access through encrypted tunnels to IT and OT systems. Each connection is brokered by the BeyondTrust platform, ensuring a zero trust approach that grants the least amount of privilege necessary. Security teams also gain full visibility and control into every session, ensuring compliance and deterring insider threats. By providing least-privilege access on demand, you can streamline operations, while reducing your attack surface and administrative overhead.

One cohesive solution

BeyondTrust’s modern, intelligent approach to PAM enables customers to eliminate identity security blind spots, efficiently remove standing privileges, and make least privilege easy. Organizations can effectively, accurately, and quickly prioritize their most urgent risks with ML-powered protection, while automated workflows enable their employees to smoothly get the access they need, when they need it, without compromising security.

BeyondTrust’s Modern PAM enables you to see, prioritize, and act on true privilege. You can address identity misconfigurations, standing privilege, and much more. You can pivot from cross-domain visibility and intelligence to streamlining least privilege access and granting JIT permissions for all user access scenarios, while ensuring fast, secure access. Security teams gain control, governance, and compliance while improving workflows across the organization. This holistic, cohesive approach is unmatched on the market today.

BeyondTrust’s Modern PAM is transforming how organizations implement successful identity security programs to support their highest priority business goals. We help organizations gain a comprehensive understanding of their baseline identity security posture up to 100x faster by identifying all Paths to Privilege™ across the infrastructure, then providing prescriptive guidance, paired with controls, to improve identity security posture and continuously maintain least privilege—even as the environment changes.

Ready to Transform your PAM? Contact us to schedule a demo, or download the Buyer's Guide for Complete Privileged Access Management to learn how to advance your PAM initiatives.