As cyber threats grow more complex, organizations must adopt a unified, full-stack PAM strategy to safeguard identities, sessions, endpoints, and cloud resources across the entire IT ecosystem.
For emerging economies like that of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), any cyber-incident is one too many. To remain part of the ongoing economic success story each business must acknowledge a modern threat landscape that increasingly uses stolen credentials to infiltrate and inflict damage within digital infrastructure. Privileged Access Management (PAM) is an important stepping-stone to a defense-in-depth security posture that can mitigate these burgeoning risks. The threats the UAE faces leave enterprises with a need for a unified, end-to-end identity security strategy that secures and governs each instance of access across all layers of the IT environment and most importantly for privileged accounts. We refer to this idyll as “full-stack PAM”.
In 2025, the modern threat actor can use a variety of paths, other than stolen identities, to breach sensitive areas. They can leverage endpoints, cloud-based assets, supply chains, and many other digital connection points within an organization. Traditional point solutions monitor each connection, one at a time, and can leave gaps in authenticated coverage for privileged access and behavioral monitoring. Use of one solution to monitor each path leads to information silos and screen-hopping based on unique features ultimately in each solution. To unify the security suite requires first, delivering full-stack PAM, which addresses the critical Paths to Privilege™ layer by layer for all access requests.
“Full-stack PAM secures every layer of privileged access—from human to machine identities—while delivering centralized visibility and control across hybrid infrastructures.”
— Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Advisor, BeyondTrust
Where secrets are securely stored
PAM starts by securing privileged identities, secrets, and credentials. Organizations must look at how they store privileged credentials and secrets and ensure they use encrypted databases (safes or vaults) and not spreadsheets, post it notes, or cleartext files. The PAM solution must enforce the rotation of passwords and secrets and be capable of automatically identifying and onboarding privileged accounts, credentials, and systems when they are enabled within the organization. Privileged identity security is not complete, however, until the PAM platform can report in detail on the status of all privileges, passwords, secrets, and their usage as per policies and regulatory compliance requirements.
Securing identities and associated accounts is only the start. Each must be monitored to see how it behaves during privileged sessions. This next layer of session management and monitoring ensures accountability and provides an audit trail for appropriate usage. In PAM, audit trails not only help with investigations but are vital for certifying compliance. Each session is therefore not only secured but recorded, analyzed, and archived in real time. This is crucial for enforcement of best practices includiing multifactor authentication (MFA), secrets obfuscation, and the principle of least privilege. At any time, administrators can terminate a session, or they can automate such terminations based on predetermined policy criteria. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can join the process to identify unusual behaviors such as access in off-peak periods, atypical commands, or attempted lateral movement commonly associated with threats like ransomware.
Having covered identities and their real-time behavior, we move on to endpoints, which remain a major target for threat actors, from software vulnerabilities through identity based social engineering attacks. Endpoint privilege management (EPM) protects vulnerabilities from exploitation and enforces the principle of least privilege (PoLP). EPM whitelists and blacklists applications to stop malicious code from being executed, thereby blocking living-off-the-land attacks even when no malware is present. Through just-in-time (JIT) access, EPM grants temporary, contextual privileges that expire when the task for which they were granted is complete, ensuring behavior, as a part of Full Stack PAM, is appropriate just for the designated task.
Into the clouds for compute
Identities, sessions, and devices are popular attack vectors, but today every SOC (Security Operations Center) must also address privileges granted in, out, and for the cloud, regardless of whether they are for humans or machine identities. Security professionals must limit access to these most dynamic and scalable resources in the full IT PAM Stack using a range of approaches such as JIT access and ephemeral accounts. It will become necessary to extend PAM to include cloud IAM (Identity and Access Management) tools into these best practices. Special care must be taken to protect privileged access
to cloud APIs in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and others. Organizations should centralize privileged access controls and standardize them across all relevant cloud platforms to prevent configuration drift, mismanagement, shadow IT, and cloud-to-cloud lateral movement present in many supply chain attacks.
When addressing full-stack PAM, we must also consider Robotic Process Automation (RPA) within IoT (Internet of Things) and OT (Operational Technology) environments. The automated privileges granted at runtime can be an exploitable vulnerability because of fast-paced development cycles, third-party integrations, secret reuse, and standing privileges exposing privileged automation. To comply with defense-in-depth requirements, enterprises must secure API keys, tokens, and other secrets associated with automated workflows based on task and life expectancy. PAM must be included in continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, and security measures must be introduced to govern access for machines, bots, agentic AI, and automated processes.
PAM has become so important that it is now an indispensable part of governance, which can be thought of as the final layer of full-stack PAM. Some legal jurisdictions and industry vertical regulations mandate certain best practices for privileged access management like PCI DSS. But even where these restrictions are absent, implementing full-stack PAM should include the establishment of clear, easy-to-follow policies that bind the identity estate into privileged access best practices. The presence of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and formal IGA (Identity Governance and Administration), provides detailed certification reports for each PAM layer and will help demonstrate compliance regardless of the compliance framework that is mandated.
Making a move forward to identity security
Identities, sessions, endpoints, cloud, autonomous processes, and governance are the key layers of full-stack PAM. To implement them efficiently and in a way that yields visible value requires a plan. Organizations should follow an integrated approach that addresses each PAM layer — an approach that begins with centralized visibility and control. Through a single pane of glass and a unified control panel, security professionals should be able to manage privileges, permissions, and entitlements, regardless of location; on-premise, in the cloud, or within hybrid environments. At a basic level, all organizations should be able to automate credential discovery and password rotation. They should also be able to automate access provisioning and password injection for the purposes of password-less security as a modern PAM best practice. All of this should be scalable enough to support any future growth of the enterprise based on its business initiatives.
As with any tech stack initiative, changes should be designed for the future. Any PAM installation should support seamless integration into legacy technology as well as future systems (in as far as these needs can be predicted). This includes existing IT and security tools like SIEM, SOAR, ITSM, and IAM. Full Stack PAM must be built on zero-trust architectures and tenets, with the access of all processes and identities continuously verified and isolated. AI should always be present to conduct real-time behavioral analysis and deliver timely and predictive behavioral insights. And, all of this should be delivered through easy-to-use interfaces that serve a range of stakeholders with extensive policy and role based access models.
The digital world may become more perilous by the year, but full-stack PAM is an effective means of fighting back. Defense-in-depth capabilities are at the fingertips of every organization to protect our identities from threat actors and build trust among stakeholders, when the world is worried about attacks from script kiddies all the way through to state sponsored cyber terrorist attacks.
