One of the most important aspects of an identity and access management (IAM) program is the securing, management and governance of the accounts belonging to superusers — privileged accounts.
Like the accounts used by regular users, these superuser accounts require access management – ensuring that admins have the access they need to do their job — and governance – ensuring that there is oversight and control over that access, often for the purpose of compliance. Unfortunately, privileged accounts have some unique idiosyncrasies that make both access management and governance difficult or impossible with traditional PAM methods.
To learn how to deal with those unique characteristics and manage your privileged accounts successfully, assume that the ideal PAM program addresses the broadest range of privileged accounts and elevated-access users. That’s where the problems start for most organizations.