The Concept of Privileged Access Has Changed

You know, it turns out that, uh, a long time ago, lots of folks recognized that there were high privileged high-power accounts in our information systems.

So, you know, variously called like a root password or an administrator account.

So those have always been around as long as information systems have been around.

And because those accounts have really, really profound consequences and power within the system, being able to maintain control is, is pretty important.

So it turns out that, you know, of course that already had a name from a couple decades ago, often referred to as PAM.

That same concept exists today. It's just obviously changed a lot.

So it's true that we weren't trying to build a PAM when we developed StrongDM.

It just turns out that when you think from first principles and you design a system for the modern cloud era, you end up sort of encompassing the promise of what the PAM category has traditionally offered.

So why is privilege access management or PAM, so ripe for disruption. Privilege access management, or PAM is at a point where it has to change because just the nature of the workloads, the nature of the diversity of access types, access modes, and preferences, it's not even coming.

It's here, it's been here for a while.

So a product and an approach that was born in an era where, for example, really controlling the password was the only way to secure these accounts and actually controlling the password was sufficient to secure the accounts.

That architecture, that approach and that sort of worldview just doesn't really map to the level of dynamism and change that's present in our modern workloads and modern sort of infrastructure and information.