From advancing IT operations and automation to managing cloud environments and third-party access, privileged access management has become a business essential.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) involves protecting the ‘keys to the kingdom’ accounts. These accounts can change systems, access sensitive data, and keep services running — making them business critical, and inherently higher risk if not governed carefully. Their importance — and the operational, financial, and reputational impacts if they’re used maliciously — means that they tend to be primary targets for cybercriminals, and a focus for auditors.
As environments scale and organizations face increased scrutiny, change, and risk exposure, managing privileged access becomes more complex. PAM managed services ease this burden. This blog explores how a PAM managed service works in detail, including why more organizations are adopting this model and how it can help you maintain control as your environment evolves.
What does Privileged Access Management do for an organization?
PAM is often considered as a way of controlling and preventing access, but it can (and should) be viewed in much more positive terms: as an enabler of operational stability, change, and growth.
Every business relies on privileged access to patch systems, deploy updates, maintain uptime, respond to incidents, and integrate new tools and services. Well-managed PAM allows these essential activities to take place without introducing unnecessary risk or friction, so that teams can move faster and with confidence.
Typical use cases of PAM include (and are by no means limited to):
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Applying updates and maintaining systems safely: Enabling administrators to perform maintenance across both legacy and modern platforms using controlled, time-bound privileged access that aligns with change and operational requirements.
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Enabling automation and integration in a controlled manner: Providing governed credential handling for scripts, bots, pipelines, and background services, removing the need for hard-coded or shared secrets while maintaining traceability.
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Supporting secure operation of non-human accounts: Managing privileged service and system accounts (e.g., payment processing, payroll, data synchronization, and system integrations) with clear ownership, visibility, rotation, and auditability.
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Improving incident response without bypassing controls: Allowing rapid access to privileged functions through pre-approved, auditable mechanisms, reducing reliance on emergency accounts, manual exceptions, or unmanaged credential sharing.
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Enabling secure third-party and vendor access: Granting external users least-privilege, time-limited access with full accountability, without exposing permanent credentials or broader environments.
Why do some organizations struggle with PAM?
Complexity with PAM often arises because it sits across all of the use cases and account types referenced above and intersects security, infrastructure, audit, and Identity and Access Management (IAM) functions. Moreover, it isn’t a one-time exercise you can set and forget. In fact, PAM’s real value comes when it’s embedded into everyday operations and supported by specialist skills, ongoing attention, and clear accountability.
This starts at implementation, where controls are established, systems are integrated, and initial audit objectives are met. It then continues through to ongoing operations, playing a vital role in helping policies adapt when new systems and accounts appear, teams change, and automation use expands. Understandably, the full scope of this work can be difficult for internal teams that are balancing multiple priorities, supporting transformation, and operating under tight budget constraints.
This is where PAM managed services come into play. Applying skilled resources, consistent governance, and the latest technologies, PAM managed services enable you to achieve an operating model with less friction, greater consistency and predictability, and the ability to adapt to environmental changes.
How does a PAM managed service work?
PAM managed services act as a capacity multiplier for teams that understand the importance of PAM but need extra help managing it well, consistently, and at scale. A managed service takes on the operational churn so internal teams can focus on the things that drive strategic initiatives and innovation.
A good PAM managed service will combine three key functions:
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Dedicated operational ownership: Ensuring someone is always responsible for account onboarding and offboarding, managing access requests, monitoring usage, and maintaining configuration alignment
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Consistency and continuity: Maintaining momentum across changing priorities, regular health checks and clean-ups, onboarding new systems and accounts, and avoiding loss of focus as teams move between projects
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Access to specialist knowledge: Providing key expertise across tools (e.g. CyberArk and Delinea), knowledge of audit expectations, and familiarity with legacy and modern systems. This is especially important in a climate where that expertise can be difficult to recruit and expensive to certify.
These functions help sustain good outcomes, keep focus in the right place as environments grow, and ensure that PAM doesn’t become “background noise” until something breaks. It also frees up vital time for internal engineers, allowing them to focus on architecture, transformation programs, cloud migration, and automation initiatives.
What does a ‘good’ PAM managed service look like?
The best PAM managed service deployments are those with clarity and proactivity at their core and that keep improving as the organization changes. Everyone knows who is responsible for what, who can access what and why, and how access is being used. Audit evidence is generated on a continuous basis. And PAM is able to evolve alongside new systems, users and regulatory expectations as they emerge.
Understanding these principles can give your organization a strong foundation when assessing prospective PAM managed service providers. A constructive approach to evaluating providers means looking for areas of alignment with your organization’s needs, asking questions such as:
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How will this service support growth and change?
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How does it reduce friction for teams?
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How is success measured beyond SLAs?
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How are audits, reporting, and evidence handled?
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What does day-to-day operation actually look like?
How a particular service works — from its operating model to its level of maturity — can make all the difference.
In summary: Making PAM work for your organization
PAM is a major part of how organizations prove they can move fast without losing control. And by supporting faster delivery, regulatory confidence, and operational resilience, a PAM managed service represents a long-term foundation for modern digital businesses.
But it’s important to remember that PAM managed services are not just about uptime. Through deeper integration with identity governance, aligned to just-in-time and contextual access, the best services are fully embedded into daily operations. This means they can support both stability and change and can improve continuously as your environments evolve.
Ultimately, a PAM managed service should make privileged access feel like a strength — not a risk that needs constant attention.
Turnkey’s PAM managed service is designed specifically around this principle, combining dedicated operational ownership, deep PAM expertise, and a governance-led operating model that keeps privileged access aligned to how your business actually runs, not just how tools are configured.
That approach delivers clear accountability, predictable outcomes, and continuous audit readiness, so privileged access remains operable and aligned to business activities as environments evolve. Contact us today to find out more.
Frequently asked questions: PAM managed services
1. How is PAM different from standard Identity and Access Management (IAM)?
IAM is used to manage everyday access, focusing on user identities, authentication, and day-to-day application and system access. PAM, on the other hand, governs the elevated or high-impact access that can change or disrupt systems, such as administrators, service accounts, and automation accounts. Because these accounts can modify systems, access sensitive data, and affect availability or security posture, PAM access is naturally controlled, monitored, logged, and reviewed more closely.
2. Does a PAM managed service replace internal teams?
No — it supports them. Internal teams retain strategic control, risk ownership, and architectural decision-making. The managed service handles the day-to-day operational workload, while providing consistency, continuity, and specialist oversight. In turn, this allows internal teams to focus on higher-value initiatives, maintain control while shedding operational burden, and avoid PAM becoming “background noise”.
3. How does a PAM managed service help with audits and compliance?
The proactive nature of a PAM managed service makes audit readiness continuous, with easy access to up-to-date information on access control, usage monitoring, exception reviews, and how controls are consistently applied. The managed service can reduce the stress of last-minute and highly manual audit efforts by maintaining evidence as access is used, producing consistent reports, and keeping policies and configurations in line with reality. All this generates predictability, regulatory confidence, and trust in the controls in place.
4. What else can a PAM managed service do for my business?
Beyond reducing security risk, a PAM managed service helps organizations operate with greater confidence, speed, and predictability. By taking ownership of day-to-day privileged access operations, it removes friction from critical activities like system maintenance, automation, cloud adoption, and incident response, allowing teams to move faster without bypassing controls.
A well-run PAM managed service also improves audit readiness, reduces unplanned work caused by access issues, and creates a clearer operating model for how privileged access supports business processes. Over time, this leads to more resilient operations, better alignment between security and delivery teams, and the ability to scale change without privileged access becoming a bottleneck.
