Beyond The Vault: Rethinking Privileged Access Security
SC Media, Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
Privileged access management has long been treated as a credential-based process. Lock down passwords, rotate secrets, and store everything in a vault - that's how you do, or did, it.
But attackers have evolved beyond the prevailing model. Today, account compromise rarely hinges on stealing a password from storage, Instead, it happens after credentials have been used, or when access has been granted and left unchecked.
At the same time, the number of privileged identities has exploded, especially with service accounts, APIs, and AI agents. There's now a widening gap between what organizations think they've secured and what is truly exposed. We need to move beyond PAM and vaults and implement vault-less privileged access security (PAS).