The management of user access to an organization’s assets, applications, and systems is never static. Users are coming and going, different roles require different access, and for some, privileged access – elevated permissions and access capabilities granted to specific users or groups of users — is needed for mission-critical business functions.
Those in the C-suite or the finance department, or even higher ups in an IT department, often need to obtain privileged access, giving them permission to access vital and highly valuable applications, data, and more. However, these privileges also make these users, and their access, a heightened target for threat actors. If a threat actor can obtain the credentials of a user with privileged access, that can allow them to quickly escalate an attack, exfiltrate data, or worse.
Because of both the elevated access and related risk, it’s critical that IT and security teams take care with the management and security of those privileged access credentials by deploying a privileged access management (PAM) framework.
What is Privileged Access Management (PAM)?
PAM is comprised of the strategies, technologies, and practices utilized to both monitor and control access to critical systems, sensitive data, and vital applications within an IT environment, specifically regarding users who have special, enhanced, non-standard, or in other words “privileged” permissions.
PAM is directly tied to privileged accounts and users who, for business, operational, or security reasons, require greater access rights than others within an organization. Common privileged accounts include those of system administrators, network engineers, or even heads of departments such as users within the finance department. Similar to other access control measures or strategies, the idea behind PAM is to closely manage privileged access and prevent an identity-based attack from originating within or compromising these accounts.
PAM follows a distinctive lifecycle which IT and security teams should follow as they implement and utilize PAM best practices.
The PAM lifecycle is:
1. Define: Define what privileged access means for your organization, assets, and applications; specifically, identify what standard privileges look like for user roles across systems, applications data, and then identify outlier scenarios that are necessary for effective business processes
2. Discover: Identify current and future privileged accounts that will need to be managed, while decommissioning any accounts that no longer need privileged access
3. Manage and protect: Continually manage privileged access and apply security measures to privileged access accounts (see below for management best practices)
4. Create visibility and monitor: Ensure that your IT and security teams can see privileged accounts and access behaviors and set up a centralized monitoring system for those accounts and subsequent access points
5. Review and audit: Continually examine who has privileged access, whether that access is still needed, and what changes need to be made to both privileged access and privileged access security measures
Key Functions of PAM in Cybersecurity
The key goals of PAM are to limit access, enforce the principle of least privilege (PolP) access on these high-value accounts, monitor and audit privileged access, and prevent identity-based threats such as permissive permissions, access misuse, or credential exploitation by internal or external threat actors.
If these accounts are compromised, it can allow a threat actor to perform serious actions such as disabling security measures, exfiltrating valuable data, moving laterally within a system, or deploying malware or ransomware. As such, PAM functions are a critical component of overall identity and access security.
Common features within a PAM strategy or solution include:
- Monitoring and recording of all access sessions utilized by the privileged account
- Vaulting of credentials in an encrypted digital vault for added security
- Providing just-in-time or temporary privileged access on a one-off, use case by use case basis
- Deploying multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all privileged accounts
- Approving access on a one-off or workflow-by-workflow basis
- Enforcement of PolP for all privileged accounts
- Integration of PAM solutions into broader security ecosystem, including identity and access management (IAM) functions and endpoint protection platforms (EPP) for increased efficiency and effectiveness
It’s important to note that, when discussing the capabilities of PAM, the term can be confused for privileged identity management (PIM). Whereas PAM is focused exclusively on privileged accounts, assets and systems, PIM focuses on identities and the governance of those identities within privileged roles. PIM strategies are more policy-focused, determining who has access, for how long, and the identity lifecycle, whereas PAM is more enforcement driven, focusing on restricting and monitoring privileged access after it has been granted.
Benefits of Privileged Access Management
PAM is critical to access security from a tactical standpoint and can be part of the strategy for an organization looking to better secure privileged access against threat actors and identity-based attacks. By limiting and monitoring access, an organization can effectively cut off an attack avenue for threat actors: unauthorized access via credential compromise. Considering that identity sources are an increasingly common way for threat actors to gain initial access — for example, 99.2% of business email compromises (BEC) cases investigated by Arctic Wolf Incident Response in 2024 were attributed back to human risk — hardening this part of the attack surface can make a major impact.
Benefits of implementing a PAM strategy within your organization include:
- Risk reduction due to limited access and increased monitoring, thus creating a barrier to unauthorized initial access or lateral movement during an incident
- Attack surface minimization through the limitation/elimination of standard privileged access or always-on access, which in turn prevents threat actors who have compromised credentials from moving within the system undetected
- Increased access visibility due to monitoring and auditing processes, which allow for traceability and enhanced detections of unusual behavior
- The meeting of compliance requirements for major compliance frameworks including HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, and GDPR
- Improved operational efficiency due to automated access provisioning, password management, and approval workflows commonly available within PAM solutions
- Better detection and response conditions due to restricted behavior baselines and clarification of what constitutes unusual or anomalous behavior
Privileged Access Management Implementation Best Practices
Understanding that PAM is a huge positive for your organization’s environment, especially if that environment is user heavy or relies on a mobile workforce, is one thing, but implementing it can be easier said than done. While PAM can provide a valuable new security control, it can add both technical complexity and business process overhead.
It’s important to realize that, before moving forward with PAM, every organization must understand its unique business and security needs. Each will have different risk tolerances, different security needs for valuable data and applications, and different ways of applying access security best practices.
However, there are a few broad steps any organization can follow to integrate PAM into its IT and security environment.
PAM best practices include:
1. Discover and assess your privileged accounts and the current access controls in this place. If you don’t know who has access to what, you can’t properly secure your most important assets. Taking inventory of current access levels across the environment and defining what the ideal and secure state is helps your organization implement a PAM strategy that fits your goals.
2. Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all privileged accounts. A simple solution that goes a long way in securing access, MFA eliminates automatic access by requiring a secondary source of identification verification, this secondary requirement can stop a threat actor from gaining access and moving undetected in the environment.
3. Automate your access controls and access security. Implementing solutions to automatically restrict privileges or lockdown access if unusual behavior is detected will ensure that all privileged accounts are properly managed while stopping threats from escalating.
4. Establish access baselines and monitor and audit all access deviations. By understanding what constitutes normal behavior for privileged access, it will be easier for your organization to detect and respond when that behavior deviates. Not only will that help your organization detect threats, but it can help expose gaps within your PAM structure that can be proactively addressed.
5. Avoid “always on” privileged access. If there are users in your organization that regularly access critical assets or applications, it can be tempting to just grant them “always on” access. While this choice may create efficiency, it also opens a major security gap. Instead, opt for conditional access that is granted temporarily, every time it is requested.
6. Apply the principle of least privilege access to privileged accounts. Just because a user has a high status within an organization does not mean they need access to anything and everything. Even privileged accounts should have their access restricted to what is needed to complete a task and nothing more. This approach mitigates permissive policies, access abuse, and insider threats.
7. Integrate PAM systems into your monitoring, detection, and response solution. This allows for centralized management, broader visibility, full-time monitoring, and swift detection and response to PAM-based threats.
Explore how Arctic Wolf integrates into your organization’s access tools.
Better understand what threats your organization’s identity attack surface faces with the 2025 Arctic Wolf Threat Report.
