Don’t Lose Sight of the Fundamentals of Privileged Access Management 

There’s a lot of discussion in privileged access management (PAM) and identity security right now about AI agents, non-human identities and machine identities. And there should be. These identities are growing exponentially; they’re going to have significant levels of access, and we need to think differently about how we control and monitor that access. 

But we need to be careful not to get too far ahead of where many organizations are today. Most conversations with customers don’t start with AI agents or non-human identities. They start with securing passwords. 

I regularly meet with companies big and small that ask, “How do we stop sharing administrator credentials? How do we rotate them? How do we add MFA to shared credentials? How do we give someone access to a server without revealing the password?” 

Or the conversation starts with remote access. “How do we give a contractor, vendor or MSP access to a critical system without giving them broad network access through a VPN?” 

Sometimes it’s about visibility and compliance. “Who logged in? What did they do? Can we record the session? Can we see if someone transferred a file or ran a command they shouldn’t have?” 

These are the fundamentals of privileged access management, and there are still a lot of organizations trying to get them right. 

Making PAM Easier to Adopt 

The challenge is that PAM has traditionally been expensive, complicated, and difficult to implement. Too many PAM projects still struggle or fail altogether. As an industry, we need to do better. 

Core PAM functionality should be much more accessible. It should be easier to deploy, simpler to manage, and fit naturally into the way people already work. System administrators, engineers and IT teams shouldn’t have to change how they access systems just to make that access more secure. Privileged access management should work with the tools they use every day. 

Agentless approaches can eliminate much of the infrastructure and ongoing maintenance that have made traditional PAM deployments complex, while better workflows can make security less of an obstacle. And the economics need to work for organizations that want to start with a few critical systems and expand over time. 

That’s a big part of the approach we’ve taken with 12Port. We built 12Port PAM to be agentless and straightforward to deploy, while allowing administrators to keep using familiar tools and workflows. Organizations can start with the PAM fundamentals—protecting credentials, brokering privileged access, securing remote access and recording sessions—without taking on a large, complex implementation. And they can expand from there as their privileged access requirements mature. 

Building PAM for What Comes Next 

We absolutely need to move PAM forward. That means thinking about session intelligence, machine identities, AI agents and what privileged access looks like when the identity accessing a system may no longer be a person sitting at a keyboard. 

But innovation isn’t only about adding new capabilities. It’s also about removing the complexity and cost that have kept many organizations from adopting PAM in the first place. 

The opportunity is to do both. Build for where privileged access is going, while making PAM more accessible for the companies that need it today.