The existence of privileged accounts creates a huge responsibility. If unlimited access to a single digital identity can be achieved, the consequences of revealing that identity can be disastrous. Hackers are also aware of this fact. For this reason, privileged accounts are important targets as they have high permissions, access to confidential information and ability to change settings.

Despite ever-increasing cybersecurity budgets, many surveys have confirmed that 80% of security breaches are due to privileged access abuse, with 66% of companies suffering an average of 5 or more breaches. The common conclusion from the surveys is that most organizations continue to provide too much trust and privilege, do not prioritize the use of PAM, and do not implement effective management even if they do. Organizations don't even take a few of the most basic steps to secure privileged credentials, as outlined below.

• There is no password safe.
• Root or privileged access accounts are shared to access systems and data.
• No multi-factor authentication for privileged access.
• Public and private cloud systems are not secured by privileged access controls.
• Big data projects are not secured with privileged access controls.
• Network devices such as hubs, switches, and routers are not secured by privileged access controls.
• In addition to the lack of implementation of core PAM solutions, many organizations do not even follow core policies to mitigate risk.

PAM solutions help organizations secure privileged access to critical assets and meet compliance requirements by managing and monitoring privileged accounts and access.

• Discovering privileged accounts on systems, devices and applications,
• Automatically manage and monitor passwords and other credentials for administrator, service and application accounts,
• With features such as isolating, monitoring, recording and auditing privileged access sessions, commands and actions, PAM solutions streamline risk management operations for security administrators within the enterprise.

According to the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant's PAM report, 40% of organizations using the formal change management process will have embedded or integrated PAM tools into them by 2021 to reduce their risk surface.