What Is PAM (Privileged Access Management)?
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a category of security tools and practices focused on controlling, monitoring, and securing accounts that hold elevated permissions — administrator accounts, root access, database credentials, and other high-privilege identities. A PAM solution typically stores credentials in an encrypted vault, brokers access through just-in-time checkout rather than standing passwords, records privileged sessions for audit, and rotates secrets on a schedule or after each use. PAM originated to govern human administrators but is increasingly applied to privileged service accounts and machine credentials as well, since many non-human identities carry the same elevated access as a human admin without the same oversight.
Why It Matters
PAM tools were designed around human logins, checkout workflows, and session recording — assumptions that break down for machine identities. A CI/CD pipeline, an automation script, or an AI agent needs a credential thousands of times a day, not a manual checkout once per session, so many organizations exempt non-human identities from PAM entirely and manage their secrets separately, or not at all. That gap matters: 80% of identity breaches involve a non-human identity (OWASP NHI Top 10, 2025), and in a typical 100-person company, non-human identities can outnumber human employees 45 to 1. A single over-privileged service account credential sitting outside PAM's vault — reused across environments, never rotated — becomes an attractive target precisely because it is both powerful and unwatched. As NIS2 enforcement begins October 1, 2026, ANSSI's ReCyF Objective 13 explicitly calls out service accounts and machine credentials as requiring the same governance rigor as human privileged access.
How Cydenti Helps
Cydenti extends the visibility and governance that PAM provides for human admins into the much larger population of non-human identities that PAM tools typically don't reach. It discovers privileged service accounts, API keys, and automation credentials across your environment, flags those with excessive standing privilege, and surfaces stale or unrotated secrets that PAM vaults were never configured to track. Rather than replacing PAM, Cydenti closes the coverage gap it leaves for machine identities. See how Cydenti maps privileged non-human access across your organization.
Explore →Frequently Asked Questions
Does PAM cover service accounts and API keys?
Traditional PAM tools were built for human privileged users and often only partially cover service accounts — mainly by vaulting static credentials. They typically lack visibility into API keys, OAuth tokens, and the sprawl of automation identities that don't fit a manual checkout workflow, which is why dedicated non-human identity security has emerged as a complement.
Is PAM the same as NHI security?
No. PAM focuses on controlling access for accounts with elevated privileges, human or machine. NHI security is broader — it covers the full lifecycle and inventory of all non-human identities, privileged or not, including discovery, ownership, rotation, and risk scoring across service accounts, keys, tokens, and AI agents.
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