Rising cloud adoption, new social engineering tactics, and AI-powered cyberattacks are reshaping today’s threat landscape. Attack surfaces are constantly expanding, and attack methods are becoming more sophisticated. More and more often, cybercriminals are targeting privileged access. And because many organizations still rely on outdated Privileged Access Management tools, attackers often have an easy time exploiting it. These are the features your PAM should not be without if you want to protect your organization from attacks.

The special permissions associated with privileged access go far beyond the rights of standard users. But that also means one thing: if attackers gain an initial foothold through stolen credentials, they can move through the network—often largely undetected. According to Mandiant’s M-Trends 2025 report, this is actually the second most common method used by cybercriminals, ahead of email phishing.

Traditional Privileged Access Management (PAM) has a number of weaknesses that make unauthorized access easier. If you recognize these ten issues in your own PAM environment, urgent action is needed:

• Persistent access rights: Many companies do not question whether privileged rights are still actually needed. They simply remain in place, unnecessarily expanding the attack surface.
• Access without context: Context-aware access is often missing entirely. Information such as time of day, location, and device is not collected, and risk scoring is absent.
• Password-vaulting focus: A password is not the same as access. Yet many PAM solutions do little more than store and rotate passwords. The underlying authorization problem remains unresolved.
• Outdated infrastructure: VPN gateways or insecure jump hosts are no longer fit for purpose and can become entry points themselves.
• On-prem design: PAM is still often deployed locally. As a result, solutions are difficult to scale and do not support dynamic resource discovery.
• Compliance gaps: GDPR requires organizations to control access to sensitive data. Without complete audit trails, however, that is difficult to implement in practice.
• Complexity: Many decision-makers struggle with PAM implementation itself, because the user experience for developers is inadequate.
• Lack of support for native protocols: Traditional solutions depend on proxy-based setups and force users into predefined workflows. Developers can no longer use their usual tools such as psql, mysql, ssh, or kubectl.
• Mixing humans and machines: While human access is increasingly monitored, machine identities often remain unsupervised. Hard-coded credentials in scripts or pipelines escape visibility.
• Third-party integrations: Automated workflows for creating new safes, discovery functions, and forwarding logs to SIEM tools are often missing. Manual steps waste time.

In modern PAM, security and productivity must not be at odds. It should reduce attack surfaces while simplifying IT operations—for IT administrators, DevOps teams, and database teams alike. Organizations that want to secure privileged access effectively today need a PAM solution that aligns with real-world ways of working, not outdated security architectures.

From initial provisioning to offboarding, a modern PAM solution must cover the entire lifecycle of every privileged access right. Automation plays a key role here. Permissions are assigned automatically during onboarding, adjusted when roles change, and revoked during offboarding.

This ensures consistent enforcement of policies. Access rules remain in place throughout every stage of the lifecycle without requiring manual administration. That reduces the burden on administrators and automatically minimizes security risks.

Modern PAM solutions replace permanently assigned privileges with just-in-time access. Users request privileged access when needed and continue working with the tools and workflows they already know—such as SSH, database clients, or Kubernetes tools.

In the background, administrators can define clear, policy-based conditions under which sensitive access is allowed, such as time-limited, purpose-bound, and context-aware access. No manual intervention is required. Standing privileges become a thing of the past, preventing attack surfaces from growing unnecessarily.

Reduced risk from compromised or reused passwords—and improved compliance at the same time: that is exactly where Privileged Credential Management comes in. Credentials are securely managed at all times. Access credentials are stored in a protected way and are only made available for authorized requests—in real time.

Passwords and keys are rotated regularly and without manual intervention. That makes misuse and compromise far less likely. Credentials stay current and secure at all times, without time-consuming maintenance.

Many PAM solutions slow developers and administrators down in their daily work. The opposite is true when tools directly support access via native protocols and familiar clients. This includes, for example, server access via SSH, database connections through standard clients such as psql or mysql, direct access to container orchestration environments via kubectl, or working with RDP sessions—without requiring users to learn new tools or abandon their existing toolchain.

As a result, native protocol support not only increases adoption among DevOps teams and database administrators, but also reduces the risk of security measures being bypassed.

In traditional PAM environments, non-human identities are often blind spots. Service accounts, API keys, tokens, or credentials embedded in CI/CD pipelines are usually set up once and then rarely questioned or actively managed again.

That is why PAM solutions need to treat machine identities as distinct entities in their own right. Service accounts, API keys, and tokens must be centrally managed, rotated regularly, and only made usable under clearly defined conditions. Instead of relying on hard-coded credentials, systems should use short-lived, controlled credentials at runtime—automatically and without manual intervention.

This makes non-human access traceable and secure. And it helps answer one central question: who—or what—is accessing which resource, when, and for what purpose?

Securing database access is often seen as difficult. One reason is that the perimeter has increasingly shifted beyond local data centers into the cloud. But that challenge becomes far more manageable when all access can be controlled centrally through a single platform.

Modern PAM solutions, for example, secure access through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), and Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC). This helps ensure that only authorized individuals have the right level of access at the right time.

Our Tool Tip

StrongDM meets exactly these requirements for modern PAM. Its access management not only promises maximum protection, but is also valued by developers as a genuine productivity boost. This allows companies to maintain control over access not just at session start, but throughout the entire session lifecycle.

BeyondTrust is an established player in the market and stands out for its continuous, high-level transparency. Within minutes, privileged accounts and credentials become visible, and identity-related attack surfaces can be defended with ease—without requiring integration work.

Not sure which tool is the best fit for your organization? We would be happy to provide deeper insight. Simply book a no-obligation appointment.

Privileged Access Management delivers its full value only when it integrates seamlessly into day-to-day work—and is not perceived as a security barrier. Only then can privileged access be effectively secured without limiting productivity or encouraging workarounds. That is why PAM should go far beyond being just a security tool. In addition to capabilities such as just-in-time access and Privileged Credential Management, it also needs to offer user-friendliness. That is how PAM evolves from a pure protective mechanism into an enabler of secure collaboration.