What is a Privileged Access Management (PAM)?

Privileged accounts are the highest-value target for an attacker because compromising one often grants broad, unrestricted access to systems, data, or infrastructure. PAM systems address this by vaulting privileged credentials (rather than letting them live in plaintext config or memorized passwords), issuing short-lived, just-in-time access instead of standing permanent privileges, and recording session activity for anything done under elevated access. A mature PAM approach also enforces least privilege by default: an engineer doesn't hold admin rights all the time, they request elevation for a specific task with a specific time window, and that grant automatically expires. This dramatically shrinks the window during which a leaked or phished credential is actually useful to an attacker, compared to a standing admin account that's valid indefinitely. PAM is a named control area in most security frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001) precisely because privileged-access failures — a shared root password, an admin account with no MFA, a service account credential that never rotates — are recurring root causes in real breaches, not theoretical risks.