Your Complete Guide to Building a Successful PAM Program

Without clear strategic foundations in place, you can’t properly define key objectives, risks, and priorities. This often leads to organizations rushing into technical deployments without any clear direction or prioritized use cases. Creating these plans from the outset is vital for keeping the program on track and communicating the vision to stakeholders.

For a PAM program to maximize its potential, IT admin, HR, GRC, Service Management, Change Management, Security Operations Center (SOC), and any third parties or service providers should all be involved. The right stakeholders should be identified and engaged at the earliest opportunity, ideally through user communities that unite everyone through a shared vision and encourage a more collaborative framework.

It’s much easier to break the barriers of resistance when executives and key decision-makers are on board with the concept. The best person to target is the CISO, as they not only have board-level authority, but also direct responsibility for security. They’ll be best-placed to champion the program, handle objections, and help people buy into the transformation journey.

While it may seem natural to stick with long-established processes and flex PAM to fit around them, you'll achieve better results by adapting your workflows to leverage PAM's proven capabilities. This approach requires upfront effort such as updating hard-coded passwords in DevOps pipelines or revising existing configuration management, but investing in these changes now creates a "fix-forward" approach that reduces manual overhead and strengthens security for future operations. 

A ‘big bang’ approach to PAM implementation is fraught with risk, as it can cause widespread disruption if it isn't managed effectively, and generate stakeholder pushback and vague progress measurement. We recommend starting with a focused scope. Concentrate on common use cases, then further break them down to identify the highest-risk credentials to demonstrate confidence-building value at an early stage.

From our experience, the best balance is 80% standard functionality and 20% custom requirements. This ensures you can reap the benefits of customization without introducing too much complexity into implementation or maintenance. Working with operational teams is important in this area, as they can help you gain an understanding of how privileged accounts are used and any dependencies that need consideration. 

User satisfaction is vital to gain cooperation and engagement with security controls across the workforce, especially for those who have long-established working patterns and extensive system knowledge. End-user representatives should be actively involved in the transformation as the voice of their communities, participating in design decisions, communication strategies, and training development to ensure a collaborative rather than dictatorial approach.

Cloud environments generally have far more complex entitlements than traditional on-premises approaches. This also means that focusing on on–premise access can create technical debt and lead to significant security gaps across attack surfaces, meaning cloud should be embedded into your PAM strategy from the start. 

PAM is not a fixed deployment: it’s a constantly evolving function that will change in line with your business, and as such, it requires sustainable onboarding methodologies. This should include documented playbooks for standard onboarding, clear escalation procedures, regular review processes, and (where appropriate) integration with managed service providers. 

The best PAM rollouts are underpinned by governance structures providing ongoing oversight, objection management, strategic direction, and resource allocation. You should have steering committees in place, including stakeholders from finance, governance, compliance, internal audit, and senior executives, collectively ensuring comprehensive program support and stakeholder engagement.