Secure Your Most Dangerous Accounts — Privileged Access Management
Privileged Access Management (PAM) controls, monitors, and audits access to the administrative credentials that attackers prize most — domain admin accounts, service accounts, cloud root credentials, and database administrator passwords that provide the keys to your entire environment.
What RLM Delivers on Privileged Access Management
Privileged accounts are involved in virtually every significant enterprise breach. Compromised admin credentials enable attackers to move laterally, escalate privileges, disable security controls, and exfiltrate data at scale. PAM closes the most consequential identity security gap in most enterprises.
How We Approach Privileged Access Management
We work Privileged Access Management the same way each time: establish the baseline, test the market properly, negotiate on evidence, and stay involved through implementation.
Privileged Account Discovery & Inventory
We discover and inventory all privileged accounts in your environment — Windows/Linux admin accounts, service accounts, cloud IAM roles with broad permissions, network device credentials, and application service accounts.
PAM Platform Evaluation
We evaluate PAM platforms — CyberArk, BeyondTrust, Delinea (Thycotic/Centrify), Sailpoint, and cloud-native PAM capabilities — against your environment complexity, integration requirements, and operational model.
Vault & Session Management Design
We design the credential vault architecture — account onboarding, password rotation policy, session management for privileged access, and the just-in-time access model that eliminates standing privileges.
Least-Privilege Enforcement
We design the privilege reduction program — removing unnecessary admin privileges from standard accounts, implementing application whitelisting for privileged systems, and the workflow approval process for temporary privilege elevation.
Privileged Access Management Evaluation Criteria
These are the dimensions we have seen separate a Privileged Access Management deployment that works from one that quietly becomes shelfware.
Standing vs. Just-in-Time Privilege
Permanent privileged accounts are high-value targets. Evaluate the PAM platform's just-in-time access capability — providing privilege only when needed, for only as long as needed, with full session recording.
Service Account Management
Service accounts are the most neglected privileged identity type. Evaluate automated service account discovery, credential rotation without application disruption, and the monitoring that detects service account misuse.
Cloud Privileged Access
Cloud IAM roles with broad permissions are equivalent to domain admin in traditional environments. Evaluate PAM coverage for cloud privileged access — AWS IAM, Azure RBAC, GCP IAM — alongside on-premises privileged account management.
Session Recording Quality
PAM session recording provides the audit trail for privileged access forensics. Evaluate recording completeness — text-based command logging, video recording, and the searchability of recorded sessions for incident investigations.
Integration with Existing Authentication
PAM must integrate with your existing IAM — SSO, MFA, and directory services. Evaluate integration quality and the authentication experience for privileged users accessing vaulted credentials.
Emergency Access Procedures
PAM controls must not prevent emergency access during incidents. Evaluate the break-glass procedures, emergency credential release workflow, and the audit trail maintained during emergency access events.
"We had three overlapping security tools doing the same job. RLM helped us rationalize the stack, cut spend by 30%, and actually improve our detection coverage in the process."
Independent means we will tell you when the answer is to keep what you have.
Where This Matters Most
Sector-specific considerations we see repeatedly in security engagements.
A Sample of the Security Providers We Evaluate
RLM is vendor neutral. These are among 600+ providers in our evaluation set — inclusion here is not an endorsement, and we are paid by the provider you choose, not by any provider in particular. How that works →
Where Do You Want to Start With Privileged Access Management?
Start with a no-cost conversation with an RLM security advisor — vendor neutral, no agenda, just clarity on where your gaps are and the right path to close them.
Talk to a Security Advisor