Privileged Access Management (PAM)
A set of tools and policies for controlling, monitoring, and securing accounts with elevated system access.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a category of security tools and policies focused on controlling, monitoring, and securing accounts that have elevated access, such as system administrators, database owners, or service accounts. These accounts are especially valuable targets since compromising one can give an attacker broad control over critical systems.
A typical PAM solution vaults privileged credentials rather than letting them sit in plaintext, requires just-in-time approval before elevated access is granted, and logs every action taken during a privileged session. This makes it much harder for a stolen credential to be used unnoticed and creates an audit trail if something does go wrong.