Guidance to a Well Defined Privileged Access Management Program

Michael Harlev, a customer success team member at CyberArk with over a decade in governance, compliance and risk, argues that a privileged access management (PAM) program succeeds only when the technology is paired with a well-defined, phased plan. He frames every attack around three risks a PAM program must reduce: credential theft, lateral and vertical movement, and privilege escalation and abuse, and pairs each with controls such as session isolation, removing hard-coded application credentials, credential boundaries by risk tier, password rotation, just-in-time access and least privilege. He then presents a five-stage blueprint ordered by risk impact versus effort to onboard, from stage one (domain and cloud admins, MFA on the PAM tool, third-party security tools) through operating systems, enterprise-wide credential boundaries and third-party vendor access, up to advanced work like mainframes, full service-account management and least privilege on domain controllers. He stresses that stages can be reordered around audits or incidents, that KPIs should be defined from stage one, and shows a real multi-year customer roadmap as an example.