What is privileged access management (PAM)?

Privileged access management is the discipline of controlling who can access critical systems, under what conditions, and with what level of oversight. In practice it covers both policy, defining who should have access and when, and tooling, enforcing and recording that access in a way that can be audited.

Who was PAM built for?

Classic PAM software emerged from large enterprise IT organizations managing hundreds or thousands of servers, databases, and network devices. The threat model was a human employee with too much standing access to too many systems, potentially sharing credentials with colleagues, and leaving no record of what they did during a privileged session.

The tooling that grew up around this problem, products like CyberArk, BeyondTrust, and Delinea, is substantial. They vault credentials so that administrators never directly see passwords. They require a checkout workflow before access is granted. They record full sessions, keystrokes and screen, so that anything done during privileged access can be replayed later. For organizations with serious compliance requirements and large on-prem footprints, this capability is genuinely valuable.

Why does classic PAM feel heavy for cloud-native teams?

Classic PAM was designed around a specific infrastructure model: humans logging into servers with shared admin accounts over SSH or RDP. Cloud infrastructure works differently. There are no servers to SSH into in the same sense. Access happens through API calls to AWS, GCP, or Azure. Identities are IAM roles, not user accounts in a directory. Permissions are JSON policies, not group memberships.

Deploying a full PAM stack for a twenty-person startup that runs entirely on AWS is like buying a freight elevator for a two-story house. The underlying problem, controlling privileged access, is real. The tooling is sized for a different context.

What does JIT access replace?

Just-in-time access handles the part of PAM that matters most for cloud-native teams: eliminating standing access to sensitive environments and replacing it with time-bounded elevation. Instead of an engineer having permanent production IAM permissions, they request access for a specific task, the access is granted for a defined window, and it expires automatically.

This does not give you session recording or credential vaulting in the classic sense. Most cloud JIT implementations operate at the IAM level, issuing temporary credentials via STS or attaching policies for a fixed duration. That is a different mechanism than PAM’s vault-and-checkout model, but it addresses the same core risk: someone with broad standing access doing something they should not, or someone compromising that access.

Is PAM and JIT the same thing?

Not quite. PAM is a broader category that includes session recording, credential vaulting, and audit trails. JIT is one pattern within that category, focused specifically on eliminating standing access. A mature access control program might use both: JIT to ensure access is time-bounded, and session recording to create an audit trail of what happened during that access.

For teams early in their security journey, JIT plus good CloudTrail logging covers most of the practical value. Korvalis focuses on this layer, combining just-in-time access with real-time guardrails on API calls, so teams get meaningful control without deploying enterprise PAM infrastructure.