The risks associated with privileged accounts have significantly escalated recently. According to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Report by Ponemon Institute, insiders who fall victim to credential theft now represent the most expensive risk, with an average per-incident cost surging to $779,797 — up from $679,621 in 2023. When stolen credentials belong to privileged accounts, the potential damage is even greater.
Deploying robust privileged account and session management (PASM) can mitigate these risks significantly. In this article, we disclose how to effectively manage accounts with elevated privileges using privileged account and session management (PASM).
What is privileged account and session management (PASM)?
According to the Buyers’ Guide for Privileged Access Management from Gartner (subscription required), PASM is one of the five elements of privileged access management (PAM), along with privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM), remote privileged access management (RPAM), secrets management, and cloud infrastructure and entitlement management (CIEM).
The key purpose of PASM is to manage privileged accounts and control their sessions. Specifically, this approach involves secure vaulting of privileged credentials and controlling access for human users, services, and applications.
PASM solutions enable users to initiate sessions via credential injection (without disclosing credentials to users) and record privileged user activity. They also simplify the management of critical credentials by automating scheduled or event-triggered password rotation.
How privileged account and session management works
Privileged account and session management solutions help organizations secure, control, and monitor the use of privileged accounts that have access to critical infrastructure and confidential data.
Here’s how PASM works in practice:
Step 1. User access request
A user initiates a session that requires elevated access privileges to perform administrative tasks or access sensitive systems.
Step 2. Request evaluation
Based on predefined policies, the PASM software approves, denies, or routes the request for manual approval.
Step 3. Vault-based credential management
Once access is granted, the system retrieves credentials from a secure vault. These credentials are never directly revealed to the user; instead, they are automatically injected into the session.
Step 4. Session monitoring and recording
Each privileged session is monitored in real time and recorded for later review. This may include screen recordings, keystrokes, application usage, and more.
By combining vaulting, approval workflows, and live monitoring, PASM solutions serve two complementary functions: managing privileged accounts and managing privileged sessions.
Managing privileged accounts
PASM’s first function is privileged account management. Its aim is to manage accounts with elevated permissions that allow access to critical data.
An organization usually has three types of privileged accounts:
- Administrative accounts
- System accounts
- Operational accounts
These accounts are among the biggest risk factors within a corporate network. They’re vulnerable to both outsider attacks and insider threats and therefore need to be tightly managed.
Privileged account management includes:
- Constantly scanning the network for all privileged accounts
- Granting and revoking access to privileged accounts
- Monitoring and auditing the activity of users with elevated permissions
- Securing passwords in a vault
- Changing passwords to privileged accounts on a regular basis
Managing privileged sessions
The second element of PASM is privileged session management (PSM), which focuses on sessions initiated by privileged accounts:
- Real-time session monitoring
- Logging user activity
- Recording on-screen user activity
- Capturing metadata
PSM can help you identify unauthorized or anomalous actions and block them until you can determine whether the suspicious activity is legitimate. Additionally, privileged session management provides an unimpeachable audit trail that proves helpful during incident investigation.
With PASM allowing you to manage both privileged sessions and accounts, you can address a large set of cybersecurity risks and boost the level of protection for your company’s critical systems.
4 main reasons to implement PASM
Privileged accounts, especially those of administrators, are prime targets for attackers who want to gain access to an organization’s critical data. Without proper management of privileged accounts, the possibility of unauthorized administrators’ actions going undetected is much higher. There are several reasons why your company should consider deploying privileged account and session management tools.
- Complete visibility of privileged user actions. With PASM, you can track every privileged user session launched across both on-premises and cloud-based endpoints in real time. Recorded session logs also show all details needed for internal or forensic investigations.
- Efficient insider threat prevention. Thanks to real-time visibility, you have more chances to prevent or respond to an insider attack.
- Robust third-party access management. A compromised subcontractor can become a weak link during a supply chain attack, leading to operational, regulatory, and compliance risks. By monitoring and controlling vendors’ access, PASM enables you to detect suspicious activities and ensure a timely response to third-party threats.
- Streamlined regulatory compliance. Adopting PASM can help you meet the requirements of many laws, standards, and regulations, including HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.
Let’s now examine the core features of PASM and go over some key steps security teams can take to incorporate PASM into their organization’s data protection measures.
Key features of PASM solutions
When choosing a PASM solution, look for the following features to ensure proper protection and management of your organization’s privileged accounts and sessions:
Key features of PASM solutions
Privileged account discovery
Privileged account management
Password management
Identity management
Privileged session management
Auditing and reporting
Privileged account discovery
This feature helps you detect all unmanaged accounts with elevated permissions across your IT environment. After identifying these accounts, you can choose to onboard or delete them, thus addressing the threats associated with unnecessary or risky privileged accounts.
Privileged account management
Privileged account and session management tools help you not only discover but also create and configure admin-level accounts across your IT environment. Look for solutions that allow you to modify privileged accounts as needed. Pay special attention to solutions that enable you to approve access requests to highly critical endpoints or grant temporary access to them.
Password management
Choose PASM systems that offer a secure vault for storing credentials. Another important feature to look for is automatic password rotation (e.g., weekly, monthly, or after each use). This reduces the risk of credential theft and supports zero trust principles.
Identity management
Enforcing two-factor authentication for all privileged actions significantly decreases the risk of unauthorized access. If your organization has shared accounts, look for solutions that also provide specific access control mechanisms for these accounts.
Privileged session management
To fully protect against privilege misuse, you need complete visibility of all privileged session activity. A robust PASM solution should provide:
- Session establishment — creating isolated sessions for each privileged user, thus improving traceability and control over sessions
- Real-time session monitoring — allowing security teams to observe actions as they happen and terminate sessions if suspicious or unauthorized activity is detected
- Session recording and playback — offering full session logs in both video and command-line formats that are searchable and can be used for audits, investigations, and compliance reporting.
Auditing and reporting
A PASM solution should have comprehensive reporting features that can provide detailed information on privileged accounts and their activities. These features enable you to cross-check incident response actions and analyze your cyber threat landscape over a definite period of time. PASM tools should provide detailed audit and video logs for both internal and external investigations, session analysis for researching suspicious events, and a report summarizing all activity.
How to successfully implement a PASM strategy in your organization
Successfully adopting a PASM strategy involves more than just deploying dedicated tools — it’s about building a holistic approach to managing privileged identities, access, and sessions. Here are the key steps to follow.
Implementing a PASM strategy
1. Assess and identify privileged accounts
3. Deploy a PASM solution
4. Implement the principle of least privilege
5. Review and revoke privileged access
6. Enforce strong authentication and access controls
7. Monitor and audit privileged sessions
8. Set alerts for risky privileged activity
9. Raise cybersecurity awareness among employees
10. Continuously enhance your PASM strategy
1. Assess and identify privileged accounts
The first step to a successful PASM strategy is understanding what privileges exist in your IT environment. Start by taking inventory of all privileged accounts, including administrators, service accounts, and application accounts. Identify the systems, applications, and data they have access to. Map out user roles and access pathways, including remote or third-party connections.
2. Create a PASM policy
Once you understand your privileged landscape, establish a formal policy framework to govern how you grant, monitor, and revoke privileged access. This should include access request and approval procedures, session monitoring requirements, alerting thresholds, and audit expectations. Ensure these policies align with compliance standards such as NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, NIS2, or PCI DSS.
3. Deploy a PASM solution
Once your policies are clearly defined, the next step is selecting and deploying a PASM solution that aligns with your organization’s operational and security needs. Prioritize solutions that offer seamless integration with your existing infrastructure to ensure centralized visibility and incident response. Don’t forget to consider ease of deployment, scalability, and support for hybrid environments.
4. Implement the principle of least privilege
Applying the principle of least privilege ensures accounts can only access the data needed for their intended purposes. Avoid granting users standing access privileges. Instead, implement temporary, session-based elevation or just-in-time PAM approaches. By reducing the level and duration of access, you can significantly minimize your attack surface and the potential for privilege misuse.
5. Review and revoke privileged access
Access rights must be reviewed on a set schedule to ensure they remain appropriate. Schedule regular user access reviews or conduct them on demand when users change roles. Be sure to delete unused or orphaned accounts as soon as they are no longer needed.
6. Enforce strong authentication and access controls
Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all privileged sessions. Wherever possible, integrate single sign-on (SSO) to streamline access while maintaining control. Additionally, we recommend setting manual administrator approvals for high-risk activities, such as accessing sensitive systems and data.
7. Monitor and audit privileged sessions
Record every privileged account session by capturing video or screenshots of privileged user sessions and related metadata. This level of visibility allows security teams to reconstruct the full context of any action taken during a privileged session. It also helps during forensic investigations and regulatory audits. In addition to recording, logs should be centralized and stored securely to prevent tampering.
8. Set alerts for risky privileged activity
Configure your PASM solution to trigger alerts for high-risk activity, such as login attempts from unusual IP addresses, accessing sensitive systems outside business hours, and changes to privileged user roles or permissions. Link alerts to incident response actions for quick remediation.
9. Raise cybersecurity awareness among employees
Regularly educate your employees about cybersecurity best practices and early signs of insider threats. Provide in-depth training for IT admins, helpdesk staff, and developers on managing and using privileged access accounts. Make sure they understand the security implications and are aware that sessions are monitored. Culture plays a big role in reducing insider risk.
10. Continuously enhance your PASM strategy
Always strive to improve your PASM strategy. Leverage user activity reports to identify cybersecurity gaps, evaluate performance, and respond to evolving threats. Track metrics like the frequency of policy violations and the number of privilege-related incidents. Use these insights to fine-tune your policies, cybersecurity measures, and training initiatives.
Implementing PASM with Syteca
Syteca is a flexible and scalable platform that simplifies PASM implementation by combining robust privileged access controls with powerful session monitoring capabilities. Here are the key features you get with Syteca:
Identify unmanaged and orphaned accounts across your network, ensuring no privileged accounts go unnoticed.
Store passwords in a vault and enable automatic password rotation to minimize the risk of account compromise and unauthorized access. Safely share passwords within teams.
Configure granular access rules, enforce multi-factor authentication, and adopt just-in-time access to limit privilege misuse.
Leverage live session and video playback monitoring alongside metadata recording for complete oversight of privileged activities within your network.
Receive instant notifications on suspicious privileged account activity and automate prompt and effective threat responses.
Generate detailed user activity reports and access audit logs to investigate incidents and discover the causes of privileged account abuse, privilege misuse, malicious activity, or negligent actions.
With its rich suite of features, Syteca helps security teams efficiently control privileged accounts, detect misuse early, and demonstrate regulatory compliance. These benefits make Syteca a comprehensive solution for any organization looking to implement a mature PASM system.
From insight to action: Enhance your security right now
PASM security is an element of privileged access management that focuses on privileged accounts and sessions. To implement this approach, you can leverage different tools for managing and auditing privileged accounts and privileged sessions for immediate threat prevention.
To optimize the advantages of PASM, you must clearly define rules for working with privileged accounts and choose a solution with the necessary capabilities laid out in this article. Syteca is a comprehensive cybersecurity platform that provides all the benefits of PASM to ensure robust protection of your organization’s privileged accounts and sessions.
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