Let’s pretend your CFO, Jane, is on a train, heading to a busy conference. Naturally, she’s hard at work on the journey.
But she hasn’t noticed that the person sitting next to her is suspiciously interested in the bookkeeping spreadsheets she’s working on.
Jane also hasn’t clocked that her name and job title are clearly displayed on a sticker on the front of the laptop and that a surprising amount of sensitive data can be quite easily inferred from the very loud phone argument she had with the CHRO half an hour before.
Long story short: PAM isn’t just about technology. It’s often easy to get lost in metrics, workflows, and scanning tools and miss the most obvious entry points.
In each of these examples, the definition of privileged access was too narrow. The organizations didn’t understand the full scope of entry points that hackers could use and focused their efforts in the wrong place.
At the same time, they lacked an ongoing culture of least privilege, leading to weak points that machines can struggle to detect.
So what’s the solution? That’s where the PAM lifecycle comes in. Done well, it should combine people, processes, and technology to achieve a holistic and continuous approach to elevated access.
The goal? Ensuring the smallest possible risk landscape, at all times.
