Privileged accounts (known as ‘root’ in the UNIX and ‘administrator’ in the Windows world) are necessary from an administrative perspective.
Administrators need easy access to elevated and mission-critical IT assets that control the operation and function of the broader enterprise. Often, the only way to get that access is to use privileged accounts.
While operating systems have become significantly more powerful in recent years, privileged access has not evolved as quickly. So a single, all-powerful level of access still exists in some enterprises. For instance, many UNIX administrative tasks can’t be carried out without root access, and many of those tasks are quite routine. While a small business may have only a single trusted person with privileged access, most midsize to large businesses have multiple privileged administrators that all need access to the same privileged credentials.