PAM
termsecuritygovernance & risk
Stands for: Privileged Access Management
Controlling and recording the use of administrative accounts - checking credentials out, brokering the session, and rotating the secret afterwards.
Its purpose is to make privilege temporary and observable, because standing administrative access is the thing an intruder is looking for and the thing an audit cannot reconcile. Done well it removes shared passwords from human hands entirely. Done badly it becomes a single system holding every credential in the estate, reachable from ordinary workstations - which is why the interesting question about any deployment is what happens to it, and to the business, when that system is unavailable or compromised.
Also known as: Privileged Access Management, privileged access