By Qfirst.news – Cyber Governance & Digital Resilience Desk – Story Analysis by Danny Zeegers
“If your privileged accounts still live forever, your attackers will too.”
For years, Privileged Access Management (PAM) has been cybersecurity’s necessary evil — a bureaucratic labyrinth dressed as a control. It promised order but often delivered chaos: too rigid for humans, too static for AI, and too blind for Zero Trust.
NIS2 has changed the game.
It no longer asks if you have access controls; it asks if they actually think.
Welcome to the era of AI-infused, identity-driven access governance — where credentials expire faster than your coffee and privilege becomes a rented concept.
The Pain Behind Privilege
Traditional PAMs were built on noble principles but medieval mechanics. Companies piled all their keys into a vault and called it “security.”
But vaults don’t manage context.
They don’t know that “Jasper from HR” doesn’t need root access to a Kubernetes cluster or that the new contractor in DevOps shouldn’t see production credentials.
Common PAM Pitfalls Still Haunting Enterprises:
- Over-centralization without context: A fortress of passwords that ignores purpose.
- Ignoring application-level privilege escalation: Inside SaaS platforms, users quietly gain admin rights like mushrooms after rain.
- Neglecting user experience: Frustrated engineers bypass controls because “it takes too long.”
- Lack of integration with IAM, SIEM, UEBA: PAM in isolation can’t detect a rogue admin copying data at midnight.
It’s like enforcing seatbelts only on the driver while letting passengers stand on the roof.
Enter AI: The Cognitive Access Revolution
“The new security perimeter isn’t your network — it’s your judgment.”
AI-driven systems are finally giving PAM a brain.
Instead of managing vaults, they observe, predict, and enforce.
- Behavioral Analytics: Learn what “normal” admin behavior looks like, then flag the 3 a.m. login from Bucharest.
- Automated Privilege Discovery: Crawl your environment to find dormant or dangerous accounts and whisper, “Delete me.”
- Just-in-Time (JIT) Access: Grant admin rights only when needed, only for minutes, and revoke them immediately.
- Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP): No permanent gods. All access is temporary and verified.
- Natural Language Interfaces: “Grant me 15 minutes of root on prod-db1 to patch CVE-2025-xxxxx.” — approved, logged, revoked.
- AI-assisted Forensics: Session recordings are analyzed automatically to catch data exfiltration attempts before an auditor ever looks.
AI doesn’t replace PAM — it rehabilitates it.
Governance, HR, and the Role of Trust
In the Zero Trust era, access control is not a technical feature — it’s a business function.
HR now sits at the heart of cybersecurity.
If HR doesn’t define roles properly, security cannot define privilege boundaries.
Every role — from intern to incident responder — becomes a governance anchor point.
Modern access systems sync directly with HR platforms to ensure that:
- Access starts after onboarding and ends automatically on exit.
- Role changes instantly reshape entitlements.
- Exceptions trigger review workflows — complete with AI watchdogs and forced login recertifications.
“Trust is no longer granted by employment — it’s earned, verified, and timestamped.”
From Vaults to Conscious Control: The Evolution of Privilege
| Dimension | Legacy PAM | Next-Gen AI-Enabled Access Governance (PIM / Zero Trust) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Concept | Credential vaulting and shared admin accounts | Identity-centric access; human + machine identities managed contextually |
| Access Duration | Permanent or long-term | Just-in-Time, time-boxed, automatically revoked |
| Decision Basis | Manual approval, static rules | AI-driven context, behavioral analytics, risk scoring |
| Governance | Periodic audit, heavy manual review | Continuous policy enforcement, watchdog alerts, role-based oversight |
| User Experience | Friction-heavy workflows | Conversational AI requests (“Grant access to X for 10 min”) |
| Integration | Limited to system accounts | Connected with IAM, HR, SIEM, UEBA for unified identity fabric |
| Privilege Discovery | Manual inventory | Automated discovery and risk classification |
| Incident Response | Reactive forensic logs | Real-time anomaly detection and AI-assisted forensics |
| Standing Privileges | Persistent, hard to track | Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) — ephemeral by design |
| Compliance Alignment | Siloed control | NIS2-, ISO 27001-, and NIST CSF-aligned governance with evidence trails |
The New 5 Commandments of Privilege
- Thou shalt define roles with HR.
If your job descriptions are vague, your access rights will be too.
2.Thou shalt grant access Just-In-Time.
Permanent privilege is the digital equivalent of leaving the vault door open.
3. Thou shalt monitor exceptions like a hawk.
Every privilege outside a defined role deserves an audit trail and a timestamp.
4. Thou shalt let AI watch the watchers.
Behavioral models don’t sleep, don’t forget, and don’t get bribed.
5. Thou shalt remember: Zero Trust isn’t a product — it’s posture.
“Chaos in the Control Room”
The alarms had stopped blaring, but the real crisis had only just begun. At a mid-sized company whose name we’ll withhold, the IT team realised their privileged access house was collapsing in slow motion. Standing admin accounts had multiplied like weeds, service accounts had gone undocumented, and every application with business-critical data gleefully accepted “god rights” by default. The vaults were full—but the control was empty.
Into this mess walked a lean security lead with a single mandate: “Get something in place fast that we can manage without breaking the bank.” The answer? A Privileged Identity Management (PIM) solution rather than another example of full-blown PAM overload. The team chose Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (part of Microsoft Entra ID Governance) — a tool that offers just-in-time role activations, time-bound privileges, and built-in access reviews.
Microsoft Learn inspires – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/id-governance/privileged-identity-management/pim-configure
Here’s what they did:
- They started granularly: critical business apps (finance-admin, cloud-production, database-admin) were defined as only eligible for elevated access when explicitly requested and approved.
- They enforced temporary elevated roles: no more standing admin rights; roles activate for a set window and then auto-expire.
- They layered in governance: every activation required justification, MFA, and generated an audit trail ready for compliance reviews.
- They integrated with HR: role changes, departures and department moves automatically triggered review of privileged eligibility — closing the gap between HR, IAM and privileged identity.
Within weeks, what had felt like chaos began to morph into control. The needless “god-accounts” were gone, the admin sprawl shrank, and the business finally had a visible, enforceable, auditable layer of privilege governance.
Conclusion: “From Vault to Vigilance”
If you’re facing the same privileged-access meltdown — the vaults full of credentials, the standing admin rights that nobody owns, and the audit nightmares — here’s the wicked truth: you don’t need a monolithic PAM monster immediately. What you do need is PIM done right.
That means: defined roles (thanks HR!), time-bound elevated access (thanks Zero Trust!), integrated approval workflows, review-driven exception handling, and a tool that forces you to think about why, when and how someone gets privileged access.
The business above didn’t go full-blown enterprise PAM in one leap. They went smart. They went tactical. They started securing their business-critical apps and secrets first, then built from there. And you can too.
Because in this era of regulation, audit and real risk — control is no longer about locking everything away; it’s about making access visible, justifiable and temporary. The vault was never the answer. Vigilance is.
The OnlyTruth
“We built PAM to control power. Now we need AI to control PAM.”
As NIS2 tightens its grip, the next wave of privileged access control won’t be about compliance — it’ll be about conscious security:
systems that understand who, why, and when before unlocking what.
Zero trust, defined roles, and AI-driven oversight aren’t just governance tools.
They are the antidote to human error and the proof that security — finally — can think for itself.
Nis2.news | Cyber Governance & Digital Resilience
Written by Danny Zeegers
