Privileged Access Governance

Short Summary

Privileged Access Governance (PAG) is positioned as a necessary evolution of Privileged Access Management (PAM) as digital transformation expands attack surfaces and increases the complexity of privileged entitlements across hybrid IT, cloud (IaaS/PaaS), DevOps, and IoT environments. Many organizations lack visibility into privileged access that is distributed across software, system, shared, administrative, named, and especially non-human accounts (service and application-to-application accounts). This invisibility undermines least privilege, accountability, and compliance, and creates operational risk through orphaned or unmanaged high-privilege accounts.

Two privileged user categories are distinguished: business users accessing sensitive information assets via application roles, and IT users administering infrastructure via system or operational accounts. Traditional IAM and IGA tools are described as insufficient for privileged scenarios, particularly shared-account monitoring, privileged activity oversight, and non-human account governance. While PAM historically centered on vaulting, rotation, elevation/delegation, and session monitoring, the emerging “new norm” adds governance, analytics, risk-based monitoring, and threat protection in integrated suites.

Key drivers for PAG include inadequate lifecycle management, poor visibility into privileged access patterns, accumulation of entitlements by users and roles, direct provisioning at the source bypassing approvals, limited privileged access certification and remediation workflows, and compliance needs such as auditing and vendor/MSP access control. Extending IGA for PAG is portrayed as difficult due to differing stakeholders, immature integrations, human-vs-non-human focus, and customization burden, despite IGA strengths in certifications, SoD analysis, and role governance. PAG adoption is challenged by unclear business value, low prioritization relative to “PAM basics,” required maturity, limited vendor support, insufficient planning, and weak collaboration between security and operations. Thycotic’s Account Lifecycle Manager (ALM) is presented as an early PAG solution focused on service-account lifecycle governance with automation, reporting, integrations, and SaaS delivery.

Interesting Facts

• Privileged users are categorized into Privileged Business Users and Privileged IT Users.
• Many organizations lack sufficient visibility into access privileges distributed across the IT environment.
• Privileged entitlements are commonly assigned to software and system accounts, and sometimes to administrative roles and individual named accounts.
• Standard IAM tools are designed for standard user identity and access management and do not cover shared accounts and privileged activity monitoring needs.
• IGA tools do not provide management of non-human accounts such as service accounts used by systems and applications to execute tasks and connect to other systems.
• Privileged users often accumulate access over time when moving roles and typically do not relinquish prior privileged access.
• Role-based access control is commonly used to govern privileged access through administrative roles containing privileged entitlements.
• Access can be provisioned directly at target systems, bypassing access request and approval workflows.
• Thycotic Account Lifecycle Manager provides lifecycle outcomes of Review, Disable, Expire, and Delete for accounts that are not renewed.
• Thycotic Account Lifecycle Manager is hosted on Azure and is available as a SaaS.

Notable Quotes

• “With a rapidly changing IT landscape in the age of digital transformation, the risks of unmanaged privileges can be disastrous to the business.”
• “This starts with a consistent lifecycle management for privileged accounts.”
• “Privileged accounts pose a significant threat to the overall security posture of an organization because of their heightened level of access to sensitive data and critical operations.”
• “Most PAM tools today do not provide capabilities of their own for comprehensive access governance but allow for integrations with IGA tools to leverage their access certification and request management workflows”
• “Without appropriate PAG, seamless onboarding of privileged accounts could be a challenge for most organizations leading to severe operational inefficiencies and security deficiencies”
• “While out-of-the-box integration between certain IGA and PAM tools might evolve over time, the basic challenges of serving different use cases will not disappear”
• “IT Separation of Duties (IT SoD) is not only a mandatory compliance requirement but is also a foundational information security hygiene principle to promote healthy critical operating IT environment”
• “As PAG doesn’t provide immediate business value benefits, it tends to appear much later, if at all, in the PAM execution cycle which further delays and complicates its implementation, leaving PAM leaders deprived of its long term benefits”
• “IAM and security leaders need to bring PAG ahead in the PAM program planning to be able to include it in the PAM design and architecture phases so they can be built with additional capacity considerations to support PAG when appropriate”
• “As privileged access certifications are deemed more critical because of their heightened impact on business and organizational security posture, security leaders are advised to conduct privileged access certifications more frequently than standard user access certifications”