Traditional PAM solutions have dominated the market for years—but the truth is, you probably don’t need one to cover the most common privileged access use cases in your environment.
PAM solutions tend to be complex, time-consuming to implement, and difficult to enforce. Their workflow changes for users like IT admins and developers often lead to frustration—and creative ways to bypass them. This leaves your critical users open to compromise until your PAM project is fully deployed.
Even traditional PAM vendors are waking up to this reality and are thinking about shifting away from their vault-centric solutions to a more dynamic and modern approach to securing privileged users. Why? The old approach of vaulting every user simply isn’t needed anymore. It’s time to be more security proactive and embrace approaches and solutions designed for today’s threats.
In this blog, we’ll explain why organizations are abandoning traditional PAM offerings in favor of a more modern approach to identity security.
Why traditional PAM is falling out of favor
For years, PAM solutions excelled at correlating multiple users into a single generic or shared account while enforcing session recording through a session proxy. This approach made sense in an era where the built-in admin account was the default for managing assets. But things have changed. With today’s hybrid environments and evolving threat landscape, traditional PAM best practices are not up to par with modern security demands.
This is due to:
- Compatibility issues with AD tiering: Accessing a privileged tier via PAM from a less privileged endpoint breaks the AD tiering model, while PAM proxy access, which fetches credentials from a vault without reaching the endpoint, offers a secure, tier-compliant solution. It does, however, impair the effectiveness of traditional PAM solutions. A dedicated PAM deployment for each tier in the tiering model, accessed from a Privileged Access Workstation (PAW) for that tier, is the only compliant method but has very little added value as it is only really needed for session recording or tracking access to shared accounts. This makes it an unappealing proposition considering the extra infrastructure and management overhead.
- Ineffectiveness of session recording: While session recording may seem like an effective solution for auditing, it’s mostly overkill for PAM admins using this capability. With proper logging configured on the resource being managed, session recording becomes unnecessary. Furthermore, most organizations don’t have the dedicated time and resources to review these recordings, reducing their value to the occasional post-breach analysis during incident investigations.
- Limited coverage: PAM solutions focus on securing known privileged users but fail to address unmonitored accounts, leaving organizations exposed to blind spots. Discovery capabilities often rely on naming conventions and group memberships, but they cannot detect bypass accounts deliberately designed to remain hidden and used by IT admins to evade PAM controls. Additionally, desktop users (tier 2), who frequently log in directly with passwords, face the highest risk of compromise and cannot be adequately protected by a password vaulting approach.
- Unmanaged NHI access: Many privileged machine accounts operate without direct interaction through session proxies, leaving PAM unable to enforce real-time visibility and security controls on these accounts. Instead, it relies on password rotation via APIs and limited activity log analysis. This lack of proper discovery means organizations cannot fully understand where the NHI is being used, while credential rotation risks disrupting systems. As a result, many organizations avoid managing NHIs through their PAM, further exposing these accounts as a security blind spot.
- Personal admin account oversight: Auditors and regulatory standards recommend using personal admin accounts for clear accountability by correlating recorded actions with individual users. While PAM solutions can track the use of shared admin accounts and link them to specific users, personal accounts provide greater security as access remains limited to fewer individuals. Additionally, shared accounts can be problematic when employees leave, often leading to revoked access gaps. PAM struggles to manage personal accounts under the vault model.
Traditional PAM practices are outdated and incompatible with the complexities of modern security environments. Faced with the different challenges and security blind spots discussed above, organizations are now actively transitioning beyond traditional PAM approaches in favor of a more effective approach tailored to meet today’s security demands with far greater efficiency.
The modern approach to securing privileged users
Traditional PAM was designed with a straightforward approach: secure privileged credentials in a vault, log their use, and rely on the assumption that attackers would be deterred. This strategy was effective in an era of static environments and centralized on-prem infrastructure, when privileged users were limited to a small group of IT admins. But today’s identity landscape is dynamic, distributed, and cloud-native. Privilege is everywhere—across thousands of identities, machines, and services—and it no longer fits in a vault.
Instead, we need a modern approach to PAM that moves beyond vaults and focuses more on identity, access, and context in real time. It should be designed to provide continuous visibility into who (or what) has privileged access at any given moment, detect when that privilege is being used, and enforce security controls dynamically—regardless of where the access happens, what credentials are used (if any), or what platform it’s on.
Visibility: Mapping the true attack surface
Visibility lies at the heart of securing privileged access. Achieving effective privileged access management requires a continuously updated, comprehensive view of all identities—human and non-human—that possess or can escalate to elevated privileges. This includes not only traditional admin accounts but also delegated access through group memberships, inherited IAM roles, cloud-native permissions, and service accounts embedded in automation pipelines or scripts.
The reality of today’s threat landscape is stark: attackers no longer need to breach the vault if they can exploit a cloud workload identity with admin-level API privileges. As a result, mapping and managing the complete privilege attack surface is essential for proactive security and risk reduction.
Real-time enforcement across all access paths
Unlike traditional PAM, which responds only after the fact, this new approach to privileged access should be built with real-time security controls. By directly integrating with authentication protocols—such as Kerberos, NTLM, LDAP, SAML, and more—it should detect privilege escalation instantly and enforce controls proactively, before any session starts.
This proactive approach can trigger MFA, block risky access requests based on contextual signals, or dynamically enforce session boundaries to restrict misuse. Instead of relying on session logs for post-incident reviews, it would disrupt threats at the point of access, ensuring misuse is prevented rather than simply documented.
Enforcing the Least Privilege model
Continuous enforcement of least privilege is an essential component of this new approach. Instead of relying on static role assignments in the hope that they won’t be compromised, a modern PAM solution should continuously analyze behavior, usage trends, and entitlements to identify and eliminate excessive privileges.
Leveraging role-based and attribute-based access controls, permissions are precisely tailored and minimized—even for service accounts and other machine accounts. When anomalies arise, they are swiftly detected and addressed in real time, with security controls enforced and risk mitigation measures promptly implemented.
Just-in-Time access: Kill standing privilege
To truly minimize risk, this approach should enforce Just-in-Time (JIT) access. Instead of granting standing privileges, users elevate access only when needed, through time-bound approvals or automated workflows.
Once the task is done, the privilege is revoked automatically. This minimizes the window of opportunity for attackers and limits the blast radius if an account is compromised. JIT access ensures temporary and traceable privileges, reducing lateral movement attacks.
Going beyond the vault
This new and modern approach to securing privileged access is not about where credentials are stored—it’s about how privilege is discovered, monitored, and controlled across your entire ecosystem. It’s a fundamental shift away from the outdated practice of vaulting all users, which introduces complex and long deployment of security controls and fails to address modern security challenges.
Instead, the focus is on dynamic and real-time management of privileged access, enabling tailored access controls without the need for complex vaulting users. It’s a huge step in the right direction from a preventive approach to more proactive real-time security enforcement, built to navigate the complexity of the current identity infrastructures and counter the attack landscape. Even traditional PAM solutions are evolving to adopt these advanced practices, better aligning with organizational needs in a fast-changing security landscape.
To learn how Silverfort’s Privileged Access Security (PAS) can help you change the way you secure privileged access, download our securing privileged access eBook or contact one of our experts today.