Reduce Liability with a Zero Standing Privileges Approach

Shawn McCabe, Delinea's Director of Engineering for Canada and US public sector, walks through the Gartner PAM maturity model to explain why standing privileged access remains risky even after an organization deploys a vault. He argues vaulting alone secures shared credentials well but can proliferate privileged accounts and grants 'fully armed' access once checked out, so the next maturity step, privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM), enforces least privilege on the endpoint itself, tied to a user's own identity rather than a borrowed account. Zero standing privileges builds on that foundation by granting rights only just-in-time, for a defined window, and revoking them automatically afterward, which he ties to federal zero-trust mandates that tend to precede private-sector requirements. He recommends starting with low-risk, high-yield targets like enterprise admin and schema accounts, using the 'five whys' (who, how often, when/how long, how deep, why) to scope requests, and integrating PAM with identity governance and ITSM tools rather than treating it as standalone. An extended Q&A covers realistic adoption, approval fatigue, and the limits of software when organizational processes aren't already sound.