Beyond PAM: Rethinking privilege in the age of identity security

Challenging legacy privilege views

Privileged access has traditionally centered on limiting access to IT infrastructure, cloud environments, and workstations through solutions like Privileged Access Management (PAM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM). While these remain key areas to protect, business applications have remained a longstanding and high-risk blind spot.

Truth be told, in most organizations, the line between what’s “privileged” and what’s not is blurry at best. Accounts, entitlements, and roles accumulate over time—some critical, some unnecessary, many forgotten. Without clarity, standing privileges linger, expanding the attack surface and quietly increasing risk.

This presents many questions, including: how do you protect what you can’t clearly define? How do you achieve a least privilege model when you don’t even know what is privileged? And are these solutions that cover only part of your identity landscape offering real protection from compromise?

What’s getting in the way?

The key challenge lies in business application entitlements. With hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of entitlements to sort through, determining which ones actually grant privileged access is an overwhelming task. The reality is grim: reviewers are often left clicking through each entitlement, analyzing attributes, and hoping a description exists—while also relying on their own subject matter expertise to make the call. At an average of three minutes per entitlement, reviewing 500,000 entitlements would take nearly three years of nonstop effort. And that’s just for the initial discovery, not the ongoing analysis required to keep privilege under control. This is a significant hindrance to achieving a least privileged access model.

Introducing a better way

At SailPoint, we believe this challenge can no longer go unaddressed. With our deep expertise in identity governance and security, we are uniquely positioned to reframe the traditional view of privileged access. We are announcing a new set of capabilities that will democratize privileged access controls and give organizations new tools to better manage privileged access for all identities.

We call this new discipline Privilege Security Posture Management—a modern approach to helping organizations understand where privilege exists, how it’s being used, and how it can be governed more intelligently. By uniting automated discovery, Just-in-Time, and rapid response to identity-related alerts, Privilege Security Posture Management will help organizations establish a stronger foundation for identity security programs that move beyond visibility to actively reduce standing privilege and risk.

How we help achieve key business outcomes

With Privilege Security Posture Management, organizations can achieve comprehensive visibility into privileges across their environment in hours—not months or years. This speed makes it possible to rapidly assess exposure, close security gaps, and maintain an always-accurate privilege inventory.

Privilege Security Posture Management reveals which identities hold privileged access, how they obtained it, and where pathways to elevated permissions exist, especially within complex business applications and entitlements. By transforming privilege from an opaque practice for a small fragment of identities into a clearly defined, manageable element of security, organizations can finally enforce least privilege and make zero standing privilege a practical reality.

Beyond visibility, Privilege Security Posture Management enforces security in real time. It validates conditions at the moment of access and continuously throughout privileged use, triggering alerts and orchestrating remediation if suspicious activity arises. This continuous oversight reduces the risk of breaches and insider threats while enabling organizations to operate with greater agility and trust.

Privilege Security Posture Management will deliver the following critical capabilities:

• Discovery and classification: Automatically identify and classify privileged entitlements, categorizing them based on the level of access they grant.
• Privilege insights: Visualize privilege inheritance, effective privileges, and access pathways using the SailPoint identity graph to gain a comprehensive understanding of privilege usage.
• Risk analysis: Provide insights into the identity requesting access, the specific privilege being accessed, and the method of access, enabling proactive risk mitigation.
• Just-in-Time (JIT): Grant temporary privileged access only when required, facilitating a Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) model.
• Governance: Implement certification processes for privileged access, manage privilege modifications, and control changes in access methods to help maintain a secure and compliant environment.
• Alert & respond: Manage and monitor changes to privilege configurations and continuously evaluate privilege access during an identity's usage, enabling swift response to potential threats and vulnerabilities.

Privilege Security Posture Management is more than a concept; it’s a new discipline that redefines how organizations think about and secure privilege in the age of identity security. In the weeks ahead, we’ll take a deeper look at each of the capabilities Privilege Security Posture Management delivers—discovery & classification, privilege insights, risk analysis, Just-in-Time, governance, and alert & respond. Each article will explore how these capabilities work, the challenges they address, and the real-world outcomes organizations can expect. Stay tuned as we unpack how Privilege Security Posture Management transforms privilege from a hidden risk into a manageable security control, and sets the stage for a safer, more agile, and identity-first future.

Resources

Learn more about SailPoint Identity Security Cloud.

DISCLAIMER: THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND NOTHING CONVEYED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS INTENDED TO CONSTITUTE ANY FORM OF LEGAL ADVICE. SAILPOINT CANNOT GIVE SUCH ADVICE AND RECOMMENDS THAT YOU CONTACT LEGAL COUNSEL REGARDING APPLICABLE LEGAL ISSUES.