How context‑aware, short‑lived roles eliminate privilege sprawl and accelerate secure engineering without overburdening admins

Access management for remote resources has come a long way from VPNs and bastion hosts. The rise of cloud platforms, microservices and remote workforces has driven a shift toward Cloud-native security controls that integrate directly with AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes. By talking directly to a cloud provider’s API, you avoid detours through proxy gateways, reducing latency and complexity.

Yet among Cloud-native platforms, there’s a stark difference in how they handle permissions. Some require security teams to pre‑create roles and permission sets, attaching them to identities or groups. Others assemble roles on the fly, taking into account who’s asking, what resource they need, why they need it and how sensitive it is. It’s a subtle but important distinction—one that determines whether your organization stays agile and secure or gets bogged down by privilege sprawl and bottlenecks when it comes to provisioning access.

When Pre‑created Roles Fall Short

Defining roles ahead of time seems sensible: you map out what engineers in a given team should be able to do and codify those permissions in your identity provider. Many platforms—even some cloud‑native ones—are built on this model. Administrators must build bundles of permissions in advance and decide who can use them.

In today’s dynamic environments, these pre‑created roles don’t age well. Consider the following pain points:

• Privilege sprawl – To avoid constantly revisiting roles, teams often include more permissions than are strictly necessary. A role meant for reading logs might also permit deleting them. Over time, these broad privileges accumulate across dozens of roles, increasing the blast radius of any potential breach.
  
• Under‑privilege and delays – When roles are kept too restrictive, engineers hit “permission denied” errors. They can’t deploy to a new serverless function or query a production database. Fixing the issue means filing a ticket, waiting for an admin to modify a role, and hoping it doesn’t take days. During incidents, those delays can be costly.
  
• Admin overhead – Maintaining hundreds of roles is hard. Every new service, microservice or cloud account demands an update. When people change jobs or projects, someone has to grant and revoke the right roles. As environments scale, so does the administrative burden.
  
• Poor fit for multi‑cloud and SaaS – Roles often live in one identity provider, while modern apps span clouds and SaaS. Mapping every permission into static roles is impractical—and they rarely offer clear insight into who actually has access to what.

Context is King: Building Roles on Demand

The alternative is to create permissions dynamically, directly on the resource at the moment of need. Rather than assigning users to broad roles, an API‑driven platform evaluates business context and environmental context to compose a least‑privilege role:

• Who is requesting access? Engineer on call, contractor, service account?
  
• What are they trying to do? Deploy code, view logs, run a database migration?
  
• Which resource and environment? Staging cluster, production database, regulated customer environment?
  
• What signals from ITSM and on‑call systems apply? Open ticket, incident notification, change request?
  

By combining these signals with live resource inventories and risk scores, the platform generates a granular IAM role or database policy. It grants only the permissions needed—no more, no less—and sets a short time‑to‑live. When the window expires or the user revokes it manually, the role disappears. This eliminates standing privileges, reducing the blast radius and shrinking the attack surface.

Unlike pre‑built roles, on‑demand roles adapt to changes automatically. Add a new AWS service or deploy a new Kubernetes namespace, and the platform knows how to grant access without manual intervention. There’s no catalogue of roles to keep up to date.

Reducing Operational Drag

From an admin and security perspective, the advantages of on‑the‑fly roles extend beyond basic convenience:

• Smaller attack surface and blast radius – Because roles are scoped to a specific resource and task, each user’s exposure is minimized. Attackers can’t leverage dormant credentials or inherited permissions; they must contend with tightly scoped access that disappears quickly.
  
• Streamlined governance – Contextual information from ticketing systems, change management processes and on‑call schedules flows into the decision engine. Policies can enforce that production access requires an open ticket or that only on‑call engineers can obtain write permissions. This aligns access control with existing governance workflows without introducing friction.
  
• Reduced role maintenance – Administrators move from hand‑crafting roles to defining high‑level policies. They focus on what constitutes low, medium or high risk; which approvals are needed; and which external signals matter. The platform handles the mechanics of creating and expiring roles across clouds.
  

Managing Privilege Sprawl and Permission Delays

Static role environments suffer from two chronic issues: sprawl and permission delays.

• Sprawl happens when pre‑created roles include unnecessary permissions that remain unused. A developer switches teams but retains the same broad access. A contractor’s role is never trimmed after the engagement ends. As unused privileges accumulate, the overall risk increases. Removing these permissions manually is error‑prone, and automated cleanup tools struggle to distinguish between needed and excess privileges.
  
• Permission delays are the opposite problem: roles lack the right permissions, forcing engineers to request additional access. Each time an engineer hits a “permission denied” error, someone has to investigate and adjust a role. During an outage, waiting hours for the right permission can prolong downtime and damage customer trust.
  

By generating roles dynamically, you avoid both extremes. Permissions are granted only when justified and revoked when no longer needed. Engineers get exactly what they need, and nothing sticks around to clutter your environment or widen the attack surface.

Lightening the Admin Load

Role management is often viewed as administrative toil—necessary but not strategic. On‑demand role platforms transform it into a policy exercise. Security teams define guardrails:

• Which operations require manual or self-serve approval versus automatic issuance?
  
• What duration should elevated access last?
  
• What external signals (incidents, change requests) gate access?
  

The platform then executes those rules at scale, interacting with IAM APIs, databases and Kubernetes RBAC to create and remove roles. Administrators no longer spend hours translating business requests into JSON policy documents; instead, they review policy changes and investigate exceptions.

Balancing Flexibility with Control

There’s no one‑size‑fits‑all solution. Organizations with static, on‑prem infrastructure might find that pre‑defined roles remain manageable. If your applications rarely change and your user base is small, a handful of roles may suffice. However, most security leaders are grappling with rapid cloud adoption, microservices and globally distributed teams. In these environments, static role catalogues cannot keep up without sacrificing security or productivity.

On‑demand roles strike a balance: they provide the flexibility engineers need to do their jobs while enforcing the controls security leaders require. By incorporating business context, identity information, risk signals and external workflows, they deliver least‑privilege access that adapts in real time and vanishes when no longer relevant.

Breaking down the trade-offs between API integration and proxy gateways for modern access management

The way organizations manage access has fundamentally shifted. In the past, infrastructure was mostly static—centralized data centers, long-lived servers, and predictable traffic patterns. You could rely on VPNs, firewalls, and a fixed set of roles in your identity provider. Access paths were clear, and change was infrequent.

But that’s no longer the case.

Today’s modern cloud environments are built for speed, scale, and change. Engineering teams push code constantly. Resources are ephemeral—spun up and torn down in minutes. Your infrastructure might span AWS, Azure, and GCP, including Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions, SaaS apps, and dynamic databases. And your workforce is distributed, collaborating across time zones and tools.

That complexity breaks traditional access models.

• Static roles can’t keep up. The roles you define today may not fit the needs of tomorrow’s environment.
  
• Network boundaries are disappearing. There’s no perimeter to defend when your resources live across clouds and regions.
  
• Manual processes are too slow. Waiting on admins to update permissions or rotate credentials adds friction—and risk.
  
• Visibility and control are fragmented. Especially when relying on proxies or legacy tools that don’t integrate well with modern workflows.
  

To address these challenges, two primary models have emerged for managing Just-in-Time (JIT) access:

• Proxy-based architectures route user access through intermediary infrastructure. 
• API-based approaches connect directly with cloud provider APIs to manage access.

Below we explore where each approach has its strengths and where they may fit in for managing your environments.

1. Deployment and operational simplicity

Proxy‑based solutions grew out of on‑prem networks. They require you to install and manage proxy servers and/or client-side agents that sit between users and resources. That architecture introduces extra moving parts and forces you to re‑route traffic through dedicated gateways.

API‑driven platforms take a different tack. They integrate directly with your cloud and infrastructure providers. There are no network changes, no additional servers to maintain, no VPN or bastion host to babysit, and no additional client side component to install. Deployment happens through familiar automation tools—Terraform modules, CloudFormation templates, Helm charts—so you can add JIT controls without redesigning your network.

Key takeaways:

• No infrastructure detours. API‑based solutions don’t require traffic to flow through proxies, so your existing architecture stays intact.
  
• Lower maintenance overhead. Without gateways or agents to update, your ops team has less to patch and monitor.
  
• Rapid roll‑out. If you’re already using infrastructure‑as‑code, you can embed access controls directly into your deployment pipelines.

• No workflow disruptions. API-based solutions grant access without changing how users interact with cloud resources.
  

2. Dynamic, least‑privilege control

One of the biggest drawbacks of proxy‑based systems is their reliance on pre‑defined roles and session logs. Access is granted at a network or account level; if you need something more granular, an administrator has to create and maintain new roles. 

Monitoring is very problematic because of the disconnect many times to the proxyed account they are using. Session logs that IR teams leverage see a single or obfuscated account and not the real person that was on the other side of the proxy.

API‑based platforms turn that model on its head. The more mature platforms do not depend on the precreated, static roles but instead evaluate business context and risk (think: the resource you’re touching, your current on‑call schedule, the justification in your ticket) and generate granular roles on the fly. 

Those roles exist only as long as necessary—minutes or hours instead of days or weeks—so there’s no standing privilege to attack. Because the access decision happens at the resource level, you can grant “read‑only” on a specific S3 bucket or database schema instead of giving blanket access to an entire cloud account.

What that means for you:

• Adaptive permissions. Policies can look at live data and decide how much access to grant.
  
• No role bloat. You don’t have to create and maintain dozens of static roles in advance.
  
• Proactive security. By eliminating standing credentials, you reduce the risk window for attackers.

• Support for ephemeral resources. Access adapts in real time—even for short-lived infrastructure like containers or CI jobs.

3. Cloud‑native coverage and seamless integration

Proxies excel at securing SSH sessions into servers. But today’s infrastructure is more than SSH: it’s Kubernetes clusters, managed databases, serverless platforms and SaaS applications. Proxy tools often struggle outside of network‑level access because they weren’t built for it.

API‑based platforms are designed for this complexity. They connect via the native APIs of AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes, understand cloud identities and roles, and speak the language of your CI/CD pipeline. They also integrate with collaboration tools like Slack and Teams so engineers can request and approve access without leaving their chat client.

For teams working across multiple clouds or adopting cloud‑native services, the differences are tangible:

• Breadth of integrations. API solutions handle IaaS, PaaS and SaaS resources, not just SSH and RDP.
  
• Developer‑friendly workflows. Access requests can be tied to Jira tickets, PagerDuty schedules or Slack messages.
  
• Modern secrets management. API‑driven platforms can leverage cloud key stores or vaults, delivering seamless access rather than forcing engineers to juggle static credentials.
  

When a proxy makes sense

A proxy‑based system still has its place. If your environment is largely on‑prem, composed of long‑lived servers and network boundaries that rarely change, a proxy can provide a straightforward way to centralize control. It can be easier to bolt onto a static network where traffic patterns are predictable.

That said, you’ll need to accept the operational overhead—deploying and maintaining proxy nodes and clients, managing agent versions and steering traffic through those gateways. In environments where agility matters or where cloud adoption is accelerating, that trade‑off often becomes a liability.

Choosing the Right Fit for Modern Access Control

If your organization runs in the cloud, API-based JIT platforms offer the fastest path to enforcing least-privilege access—without the complexity of proxies or the rigidity of static roles.

Apono takes this further.

As a cloud-native platform, Apono delivers ephemeral, context-aware access directly on the resource. It evaluates real-time identity, risk, and business signals to automate just-in-time, just-enough permissions—eliminating manual role maintenance and reducing overexposure.

Proxy-based tools may work for static, on-prem environments—but they often fall short in modern, dynamic infrastructure.

Let us show you how Apono fits your cloud-native environment and book your personalized demo today.

New details are emerging about a wave of intrusions into Amazon Web Services environments. Attackers are reportedly weaponizing AWS IAM, using it to validate stolen credentials and turn identity controls into a springboard for in-cloud abuse.

According to new research from Fortinent, attackers are leveraging the open source TruffleHog tool to automate testing of stolen AWS credentials in what they are calling the TruffleNet infrastructure. 

In their report, researchers say that the hackers are abusing AWS IAM to actually test the validity of their stolen credentials using a GetCallerIdentity call. 

Once inside their targets’ environments, attackers are exploiting the compromised infrastructure to carry out Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks via AWS’s Simple Email Service (SES).

Additionally, Fortinent’s researchers observed that the attackers were using the AWS CLI to query the GetSendQuota API for SES. They believe these queries to be a part of the abuse of SES for use in their downstream attacks like the BEC attacks that have been cited in the researchers’ report. 

Read Fortinent’s blog post for more info on how the attackers are leveraging open source tools and AWS infrastructure, as well as the tricks used for their BEC campaign. 

How Compromised Identities Pave the Way for Higher-value Attacks

At this stage, the BEC attacks appear to be the “smash and grab” part of the plan. 

But researchers note that the hackers are also leveraging their infiltration capabilities to carry out reconnaissance inside the compromised infrastructure. 

This snooping around can be the crucial first step in future stages of their operations where attackers can go after sensitive resources like regulated data (think PII & PHI) as well as production environments that can harm the business. 

There are a number of valuable take aways from this story that reinforce what we know surrounding the risks of compromised credentials:

• We see the continued risk of stolen or otherwise compromised credentials. We know that credential compromise is a question of when and not if. 
• Attackers are becoming increasingly adept at leveraging not only the infrastructure of our cloud environments for their criminal activities. They are abusing the tools that we use for managing access privileges within our cloud infrastructure as part of their operations.
• Hackers can leverage any standing access that a compromised identity may have to illicitly access resources like we see with the abuse of AWS SES. 
• The level of privileges attached to an identity matters. Researchers cite that while attempts to create new users failed, they apparently succeeded in compromising a user who had sufficient privileges to cause havoc with SES. Had they compromised an IAM user with the right privileges, then they could have made numerous identities.

How Apono Helps Secure Your AWS

Remove Standing Access

By eliminating standing access the attacker cannot use any attached privileges to access resources, even if an identity is compromised. By moving to a Just-in-Time (JIT) access model, all access is made available to identities, human or not, temporarily and instantaneously. This ensures that access privileges are not abused and improves developer velocity.

Minimize the Blast Radius

Continuously reduce privileges to support least-privilege ops via a Just-Enough (JEA) approach. Apono’s Access Discovery capabilities uncover overprivileged identities and provide data-driven recommendations on how to reduce privileges without impacting productivity, all based on real usage.

Simplify Remediations

Apono’s approach to reducing privileges steps away from the binary of choosing to either leave risky privileges in place or revoking privileges that can break processes. Risky privileges can be quarantined via Access Flow deny policies, enabling security teams to quickly remove the risk and quickly reverting access if needed.

Apono enables organizations to adopt a Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) approach in support of their Zero Trust initiatives.

Ready to Take a Smarter Approach to Cloud Access?

See how Apono can help your organization prevent credential-based attacks while keeping teams fast and productive. Visit apono.io/jit-and-jep/ to learn more about our platform or request a demo.

AI is rewriting the rules of privileged access, but the rise of AI agents is creating a governance crisis. Threats like credential stuffing and privilege escalation are now accelerated by autonomous systems moving faster than humans can react. 

82% of companies deploy autonomous AI agents, but 23% of IT teams admit those bots have already been tricked into revealing credentials—and fewer than half have guardrails in place. In modern infrastructure, machine identities now outnumber humans 80:1. These non-human identities (NHIs) power everything from APIs to AI pipelines, and each one needs access. 

The problem? Legacy PAM tools, which remain vault-centric, weren’t built for this scale. Cloud PAM solutions step in with just-in-time, least-privilege access to shrink your attack surface and keep both humans and machines in check.

What are cloud PAM solutions?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) controls and monitors the use of accounts with elevated permissions. It is closely related to enterprise identity management, and traditional PAM meant vaults, long-lived credentials, heavy-handed approvals, and developer friction. 

Cloud PAM solutions are the modern evolution of PAM, purpose-built for cloud-native and API-driven environments. Instead of relying on static roles and clunky approvals, cloud PAM delivers on-demand, time-bound access through automation and integrations. These solutions use Just-In-Time (JIT) access to issue ephemeral credentials that expire automatically, ensuring no leftover privileges are waiting to be exploited.

Cloud PAM is designed to secure not just human admins but also the massive number of non-human identities (service accounts, API keys, and ML pipelines) that dominate today’s AI-driven workloads.

Table 1: Legacy vs Cloud PAM

Feature	Legacy PAM	Cloud PAM
Architecture	Built for on-premises, data center environments	Cloud-native, API-first, designed for distributed systems
Access Model	Static roles and long-lived credentials stored in vaults	Just-In-Time (JIT) access with ephemeral, auto-expiring permissions
Deployment	Heavy agents, complex setup	Lightweight integrations, deploys quickly in cloud stacks
Scope of Protection	Focus on human administrators	Secures both human and non-human identities (service accounts, API keys, ML pipelines)
Scalability	Limited flexibility, difficult to scale across multi-cloud	Dynamic, scalable for cloud-native and AI workloads
Risk Exposure	Standing privileges, static secrets, higher attack surface	Least-privilege, time-bound access reduces attack surface

Why Cloud PAM Solutions are Essential in an AI-Driven World

AI workloads bring massive growth in both human and non-human identities, and here are four reasons why cloud PAM solutions are superior for modern problems:

1. Scale with automation: Automates provisioning and revocation for thousands of service accounts, agents, and pipelines.
2. Simplify compliance:  Automated logs and reports reduce the time and cost of preparing evidence for frameworks like HIPAA and SOC 2.
3. Extend zero trust: Applies strict verification and time-bound access to both human and non-human identities.
4. Reduce attack surface: Automated remediation and vulnerability management help eliminate standing privileges, shrinking the impact of stolen or misused credentials.

🔍 Evaluate Your Next Cloud PAM Move
Not all PAM tools were built for AI-driven environments. Download the Access Platform Buyer’s Guide to see how leading security teams evaluate Cloud PAM capabilities — from Zero Standing Privilege to Non-Human Identity control.

Key Features to Look For in a Modern Cloud PAM Solution

Not all PAM platforms are built for cloud-native, AI-driven environments. When evaluating modern cloud PAM tools, these features should be at the top of your list:

• Comprehensive audit & reporting: Maintain full visibility into who accessed what, when, and why, which is critical for meeting compliance standards.
• Seamless integrations: Connect easily with Slack, Teams, CI/CD pipelines, cloud providers, and AI dev tools to keep workflows fast and secure.
• JIT access: Issue temporary, auto-expiring permissions so humans and non-human identities get access only when needed.
• Granular policy enforcement: Define fine-grained controls across AI datasets, ML training clusters, APIs, and multi-cloud environments.
• Break-glass and on-call workflows: Enable pre-approved emergency access during incidents without sacrificing control or visibility.

How to Choose the Best Cloud PAM Solutions for AI Workloads

With so many cloud PAM tools on the market, choosing the right one for AI-heavy environments means focusing on more than just credential storage. Here’s what to look for:

• AI/ML integration support: Ensure the platform integrates smoothly with Kubernetes clusters, GPU workloads, data lakes, and other components of your ML pipeline.
• Automation-first design: Prioritize solutions that provide JIT access, auto-revocation of permissions, and policy-driven workflows at scale.
• Regulatory readiness: Check that the solution simplifies compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, and other standards relevant to AI workloads.
• Developer-friendly experience: Look for ChatOps and CLI access so engineers can request and receive permissions instantly without waiting on ticket queues.

8 Best Cloud PAM Solutions for the AI World

Let’s break down the best privileged access management software options for cloud-native and AI-driven workloads. 

1. Systancia

The Systancia Cleanroom solution enables session isolation and real-time monitoring to protect critical systems from credential theft and insider threats. Unlike traditional vault-centric PAM, Systancia delivers a cloud-native approach that prioritizes user experience and regulatory compliance. 

Main Features:

• Apply enhanced authentication and continuous identity checks (e.g., “Cleanroom Authograph”).
• Supports multiple deployment modes: on-premises, hybrid, or cloud.
• Adapts traceability, control, and protection levels depending on the criticality of the intervention (e.g., standard / advanced / full levels).

Best for: Regulated industries needing strong session isolation. 

Price: By inquiry. 

Review: “It’s easy to understand and use. [I like the features, such as] password rotation, recording sessions, white room administration, MFA, [and more].”

2. Apono

Apono is a cloud-native access management platform purpose-built for the scale and speed of modern, AI-driven environments. Unlike vault-based PAM, Apono delivers an API-first model that automates JIT and least privilege access for both human and non-human identities. By issuing ephemeral, auto-expiring permissions, Apono ensures users and services get precisely the access they need—only when they need it. 

Main Features:

• On-demand, self-serve access from Slack, Teams, or CLI.
• Automatic provisioning and revocation for humans and service accounts to strengthen your machine identity management posture. 
• Audit logs that show exactly who accessed what, when, and why.
• Cloud connectors that deploy in under 15 minutes.
• Break-glass and on-call flows for fast, controlled incident response.
• Scoped, time-limited vendor access to prevent external overreach.

Best for: Cloud-native organizations running AI/ML pipelines that need to secure both human and non-human identities with fast, just-in-time access.

Price: By inquiry. 

Review: “As a SecOps Manager implementing the Apono platform, I experienced significant improvements in our organization’s security posture, operational efficiency, and compliance capabilities.”

3. Wallix Bastion

Wallix Bastion’s PAM platform focuses on delivering secure, auditable control over administrative accounts in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Gartner recognizes it for helping enterprises enforce the least privilege and monitor privileged activity. 

Main Features:

• Available on-premises, in the cloud, or as a managed service.
• Provides temporary, context-based access to privileged accounts.
• Securely stores, rotates, and manages privileged account credentials with password vaulting.

Best for: Enterprises requiring centralized credential management. 

Price: By inquiry. 

Review: “WALLIX PAM provides strong security for privileged access management with an intuitive interface, real-time monitoring, and robust audit logs.”

4. StrongDM

StrongDM is a modern infrastructure access platform that approaches PAM differently. Instead of traditional password vaults, it focuses on secure, dynamic connectivity. It gives developers, DevOps, and security teams centralized control over access to databases, servers, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud environments.

Main Features:

• Captures detailed logs of every session, command, and query for compliance and troubleshooting.
• Integrates into existing workflows, with support for CLI and SDKs.
• Eliminate the need for long-lived secrets by brokering connections directly.

Best for: DevOps teams wanting frictionless, VPN-free access to databases, servers, and Kubernetes.

Price: By inquiry.

Review: “The integration capabilities are top-notch, allowing us to embed StrongDM into complex environments with minimal friction.”

5. Teleport

Teleport is an open-source platform that unifies secure access to servers, databases, Kubernetes clusters, and internal applications under a single, identity-based solution. Teleport uses certificates and short-lived credentials to provide strong, auditable privileged access. 

Main Features:

• Records all SSH, Kubernetes, and database sessions with full visibility for compliance.
• Integrates with SSO/IdPs (Okta, Azure AD, etc.) to enforce fine-grained least privilege.
• Built-in identity-aware proxy ensures every request is authenticated and authorized without relying on a VPN.

Best for: Engineering teams favoring open-source, zero trust access with short-lived certificates.

Price: Open-source version is free; enterprise pricing available by inquiry.

Review: “The session recording and audit logging features are incredibly useful for compliance and troubleshooting.”

6. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

CyberArk’s PAM solution combines credential vaulting, session monitoring, and threat detection to deliver enterprise-grade control over privileged accounts in hybrid and cloud environments. 

Main Features:

• Leverages AI-driven monitoring to detect anomalies in privileged account usage.
• Integrates with identity providers, cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP), and DevOps pipelines.
• Eliminates standing privileges by provisioning temporary, role-based access to critical assets.

Best for: Large enterprises and highly regulated sectors needing enterprise-grade PAM with vaulting and anomaly detection. 

Price: By inquiry. 

Review: “CyberArk Privileged Access Management (PAM) is an excellent tool for any organization looking to protect privileged access to critical systems and sensitive data.”

7. Netwrix 

Netwrix Privilege Secure is part of Netwrix’s suite, which delivers end-to-end privileged access control with task automation and compliance built in. It’s designed to eliminate standing privileges and make administrative access safer and easier to manage across hybrid environments. 

Main Features:

• Automates high-risk tasks (patching, password resets, etc.) with workflows and ephemeral access. 
• Provides time-limited, MFA-protected access for remote or third-party users.
• Full session recordings, keystroke/log capture, and approval and activity logs.

Best for: Organizations battling privilege sprawl who need continuous discovery. 

Price: By inquiry. 

Review: “[I like the] do-it-yourself proof of concept, open and straightforward commercial track, variety of architectural designs, and seamless rollout.”

8. JumpCloud

While it’s broader than traditional PAM, JumpCloud is an open directory platform with privileged access capabilities designed to help organizations manage admin rights, enforce least privilege, and secure hybrid IT environments.

Main Features:

• Controls and secures privileged access on Windows, macOS, and Linux devices.
• Extends secure, frictionless access to apps and infrastructure with built-in MFA and SSO across thousands of SaaS apps.
• Assigns granular admin rights and enforces just-in-time elevation of privileges.

Best for: IT teams consolidating identity, device, and privileged access management into a single, all-in-one cloud directory platform (although PAM is not its core strength). 

Price: Free plan available; paid plans start per user/month, with enterprise pricing by inquiry.

Review: “As a developer, I really appreciate the smooth integrations with different tools and the straightforward APIs—it saves a lot of time when setting up authentication and access controls.”

Table 2: Best Cloud PAM Solutions in a Snapshot

Solution	Main Features	Best For	Price
Systancia	Enhanced authentication, multiple deployment modes, adaptive control levels	Regulated industries needing strong session isolation	By inquiry
Apono	JIT access, self-serve via Slack/Teams/CLI, auto-expiring credentials, detailed audit logs, fast deployment	Cloud-native orgs running AI/ML pipelines securing human & non-human identities	By inquiry
Wallix Bastion	On-prem, cloud, or managed service; context-based temporary access; password vaulting	Enterprises requiring centralized credential management	By inquiry
StrongDM	Session & query logs, CLI/SDK integrations, connection brokering (no static secrets)	DevOps teams wanting frictionless, VPN-free infra access	By inquiry
Teleport	Certificate-based access, session recording, IdP integration, identity-aware proxy	Engineering teams favoring open-source, Zero Trust access	Free OSS; enterprise pricing by inquiry
CyberArk	Credential vaulting, anomaly detection, integrations with major clouds/IdPs, JIT access	Large enterprises & regulated sectors needing enterprise-grade PAM	By inquiry
Netwrix	Privileged task automation, MFA-protected temporary access, detailed auditing & compliance logs	Orgs battling privilege sprawl needing continuous discovery	By inquiry
JumpCloud	Cross-platform device control, SSO & MFA, granular admin rights with JIT elevation	IT teams consolidating identity, device, and privileged access	Free plan; paid per user/month

Securing Privileged Access in the AI Era

In an AI-first enterprise, privileged access is both the biggest enabler and the greatest risk. Cloud PAM solutions help organizations scale securely, replacing static controls with just-in-time, least-privilege access. 

Apono is built for this world: API-driven, cloud-native, and designed to protect non-human identities. With ephemeral, auditable permissions, your teams move fast and your auditors stay happy. See Apono in action to explore how it secures AI workloads without slowing developers.

Identity is now the most common entry point for attackers. In cloud-native environments, thousands of microservices, containers, and agents request credentials every day, and each one represents a potential weakness. The imbalance between human and non-human identities (NHIs) is growing, but many organizations still devote the bulk of their identity and access governance (IGA) efforts to the former. 

Over the past two years, 57% of organizations experienced at least one API-related breach; of those, 73% saw three or more incidents. At the same time, the global IAG market was valued at approximately $8 billion in 2024, driven by compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA that demand auditable proof of access controls.

The takeaway: static defenses built on logins and standing permissions can’t keep pace with identities that appear and disappear daily. For engineering teams, identity and access governance has shifted from a “nice-to-have” to a baseline requirement for both security and trust.

What is identity and access governance (IGA)?

Identity and access governance (IGA) is the framework your organization can use to decide who should have access to systems, applications, and data, and whether that access is still appropriate. IGA goes beyond the mechanics of logging and instead focuses on oversight, accountability, and policy enforcement.

Most IGA programs are built around a few core practices:

• Identity lifecycle management: Provisioning, modifying, and deprovisioning accounts.
• Role and entitlement management: Grouping permissions and enforcing least privilege.
• Access reviews and certifications: Recurring checks to validate appropriateness of access.
• Compliance reporting: Generating evidence required by auditors and regulators.

Unlike identity and access management (IAM), which enforces access at runtime, IGA asks the harder question: should this access exist at all? Answering this question is harder today because identities are multiplying. Machine identities outnumber humans by over 80 to 1, making them one of the fastest-growing risk classes in cloud-native environments. Unlike human accounts, NHIs rarely go through onboarding or offboarding, rely on static API keys or long-lived tokens, and are frequently overprivileged—the perfect storm for attackers.

Source

Core capabilities of Identity and Access Governance

IGA is about ensuring access is both appropriate, accountable, and, most importantly, auditable. To achieve these three pillars, IGA platforms bring together several capabilities.

• Access reviews and certification: Periodic checks give managers and system owners the chance to confirm that permissions are still valid. They’re meant to clean up access left behind after job changes, project work, or employee turnover.

• Role and entitlement management: Permissions are grouped into roles to make administration manageable. This model keeps access consistent across teams and reduces the scatter of exceptions that creep in over time.

• Separation of Duties (SoD): SoD prevents conflicting privileges so that no single identity has the ability to commit fraud or bypass checks.

• Audit and compliance reporting: Most frameworks, from SOC 2 to GDPR, require proof that access is being governed. Automated reports provide that evidence and complement broader vulnerability management programs designed to reduce risk. 

• Delegated administration and approval workflows: Requests can be routed to business or technical owners who best understand whether access makes sense. This step spreads responsibility more evenly, while decisions remain logged centrally.

Crucially, modern IGA extends these capabilities beyond human users to include NHIs, ensuring service accounts and automation agents undergo the same scrutiny as employees.

Source

IGA, IAM, and PAM Compared

Identity management has grown into a set of overlapping disciplines, each with its own focus. Many people still use the terms interchangeably, but this approach can blur the lines between strategic governance and privileged account protection.

It’s helpful to understand exactly where each begins and ends. IAM is concerned with authentication and access control at the point of login. IGA adds oversight, certification, and auditability across all identities. To monitor and control their activity, privileged access management (PAM) narrows in on the riskiest accounts, such as administrators and root users. For example, organizations rely on PAM software to enforce controls around these sensitive accounts, ensuring that high-risk permissions are granted only when necessary and closely monitored.

Table 1: IGA vs IAM vs PAM

Discipline	Focus	Typical Scope	Key Purpose
IAM	Enforcement	Authentication, MFA, SSO	Prove identity and control access at login
IGA	Governance	Human and non-human identities	Define, review, and certify who should have access and why
PAM	Privilege	High-risk administrator and root accounts	Control and monitor privileged sessions

5 Challenges of Implementing IGA in Cloud-Native Environments

1. Scaling Ephemeral Identities

In a cloud-native stack, thousands of containers, pods, and serverless functions may launch and terminate within minutes. Each instance often requires its own token or temporary credential to function. Legacy governance processes that rely on quarterly or monthly reviews cannot track this churn, so permissions are left unchecked. Security teams end up with audit trails that miss most of the short-lived identities, which makes proving compliance or investigating incidents almost impossible. A best practice to overcome this challenge is to use a cloud-native access management solution like Apono, which automates JIT access and generates granular audit logs, so even short-lived identities are governed in real time.

2. Complex Permissions

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP offer permission systems with thousands of individual actions that can be combined into highly customized roles. Developers frequently over-provision roles because mapping business tasks to such granular entitlements is too time-consuming. Over time, these permission sprawl problems multiply, creating toxic combinations that static governance models don’t properly evaluate.

3. Friction with Development Teams

When engineers need access to a production database or a new cloud service, the request usually goes into a ticket queue. When reviews take too long, teams are forced to delay work or find workarounds such as borrowing credentials. 

This bottleneck not only slows delivery but also weakens governance because security becomes seen as a blocker rather than a partner. In some organizations, administrators pre-approve broad entitlements “just in case.” This mistake undermines the entire principle of least privilege and increases the chance of compromised credentials being abused across environments. 

4. Non-Human Identities

Source

Unmonitored NHIs are among the most consistent attack vectors in identity-driven breaches today. Service accounts and automation agents run critical workflows in CI/CD pipelines, monitoring systems, and infrastructure tools. These identities often carry long-lived credentials with powerful permissions. Unlike human users, they rarely leave the organization, so deprovisioning processes don’t catch them. 

When one of these accounts is forgotten or left unmonitored, it becomes a permanent backdoor. Attackers frequently target exposed API keys or tokens for this reason, knowing they are less likely to be rotated or reviewed. As we’ve seen with emerging issues like the MCP protocol, unsecured machine-to-machine communications can further amplify the risks of unmanaged NHIs.

Recent examples include Microsoft’s 2023 SAS Token Leak, where researchers inadvertently published a token that exposed 38TB of internal data, and the BeyondTrust API Key Breach in 2024, where attackers exploited an overprivileged, static key to reset passwords and escalate privileges. Both incidents highlight how unmanaged non-human identities can open the door to large-scale compromise.

An essential NHI security best practice is to run a Cloud Access Assessment to uncover risks in your AWS environment, provided by Apono at no cost (for a limited time only). Apono’s platform is built to close this blind spot by enforcing JIT and JEP policies for NHIs just like human accounts, stopping long-lived keys from becoming backdoors. 

5. Fragmented Visibility

Most enterprises work across multiple clouds, each with its own identity console and reporting format. Security teams trying to answer “who can access sensitive data” are forced to stitch together incomplete reports. The lack of a unified view leaves gaps for auditors and prevents real-time oversight—a challenge that becomes even more critical in industries like FinTech or government, which are subject to additional compliance requirements like CUI Basic.

How Modern IGA is Evolving

Identity governance is moving from periodic checks to continuous oversight. Instead of leaving broad permissions in place and revisiting them months later, newer approaches shift towards:

• Just-in-Time access (JIT): Temporary access that expires automatically and reduces the window of risk while giving auditors a clearer picture of how access is actually being used. JIT access automation and contextual approval workflows are essential for scaling governance without undermining developer productivity.
• Zero Trust: Assumes no identity should have standing access by default. Every request must be verified in context, regardless of whether it comes from a human developer or a bot in a CI/CD pipeline. 
• Just-Enough Privileges (JEP): JEP is particularly important for NHIs. JEP grants the minimum rights needed for a task for the shortest possible time. This shift addresses the chronic overprovisioning of machine identities, aligns with Zero Trust, and directly reduces the blast radius of a potential compromise.
• Workflow integration: Approvals embedded into Slack, Teams, or CLI so governance fits into daily developer workflows.

By enforcing just-in-time access and contextual approvals, IGA reduces the standing permissions that often undermine API security in CI/CD pipelines and cloud workloads.

Bringing Automation to the Center of Governance with Apono

Cloud-native deployments and the explosion of non-human identities have pushed traditional identity governance past its limits. Static reviews and manual approvals leave too much standing access in environments where roles and permissions change constantly. To reduce risk, governance needs automation, time-bound access, and policies that apply equally to people and non-human accounts.

Apono redefines IGA for cloud-native teams. It eliminates risky standing permissions for both human and non-human identities, while ensuring compliance frameworks increasingly require full visibility into NHI governance. Apono’s platform automates JIT and JEP to eliminate standing permissions, generates granular audit logs for compliance, and applies governance equally to human and non-human identities. Approvals flow directly through Slack, Teams, or CLI—every action logged, every change auditable.

With built-in break-glass and on-call flows, and deployment in under 15 minutes, Apono delivers Zero Trust governance at the speed of modern infrastructure.

Ready to Eliminate Standing Access Risk?

Apono closes the gap by automating JIT and JEP for both human and non-human identities — stopping long-lived keys from becoming backdoors.Download The Security Leader’s Guide to Eliminating Standing Access Risk to see how leading cybersecurity companies are rethinking access control.

New details are emerging in recent weeks on how the Crimson Collective threat group has been conducting a large-scale campaign targeting Amazon Web Services cloud environments. Recent reports highlight how easily the attackers progressed once they obtained valid credentials.

The Crimson Collective claims to have exfiltrated ~570 GB across ~28,000 internal GitLab projects; Red Hat has confirmed access to a Consulting GitLab instance but hasn’t verified the full scope of those claims.

After the breach became public, Bleeping Computer reports that the threat actors partnered with headline-grabbing extortion group, Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, to increase pressure on Red Hat.

In this post, we’ll break down how the hackers carried out their attack and how to keep your organization protected via a Zero Standing Privileges approach.

Breaking Down the Attackers’ Methodology 

According to the report from Rapid 7 in Bleeping Computer, the attackers took a tried but true course of action to compromise their targets and make off with their illicitly obtained data.

1. Find exposed keys — They used TruffleHog to scan target environments and discover secrets in repos, configs, or other leaks to gain initial access.
   
2. Establish persistence — Then they used the leaked keys to call AWS APIs and create highly privileged IAM users/login profiles and new access keys.
   
3. Privilege escalation — With their foot firmly in the door, they attached AdministratorAccess to their new users. Boom: full control.
   
4. Recon — Privileges in hand, they then hit the cloud running, enumerating users, EC2, S3 buckets, RDS clusters, EBS volumes, regions, and apps to map the prize.
   
5. Data collection — Next they started hoovering up data, changing RDS master passwords, taking snapshots of their targets’ DBs and EBS volumes.
   
6. Exfiltration — With the targets’ data collected, they moved the snapshots/objects to S3 buckets that they controlled or accessible storage; using EC2s that they spun up and attaching volumes under permissive security groups for faster transfers.
   
7. Extortion — Finally, they sent ransom notes from inside the AWS account using SES and to external contacts.

The Cloud Identity Challenge

This latest attack highlights a tough if not cliche truth in the cloud: attackers don’t need to break in if they can just log in. Once credentials with standing privileges are compromised, it gives them everything they need to move freely across environments.

The reality is that credential compromise is now a matter of when, not if. And as the number of Non-Human Identities (NHIs)—like service accounts, IAM roles, and API keys—continues to explode, the challenge keeps growing. In many organizations, NHIs now outnumber human users by roughly 200 to 1.

Things are getting even more complicated with the rise of Agentic AI tools. These systems operate at massive scale with unpredictable access needs, often without the visibility security teams rely on to monitor what’s actually being accessed.

Protecting against these kinds of attacks means focusing not just on preventing credential theft, but on minimizing what attackers can do after credentials are compromised. That’s why AWS told BleepingComputer that customers should “use short-term, least-privileged credentials and implement restrictive IAM policies.”

That advice perfectly captures the idea behind Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP), reducing the amount of always-on access available in your environment, so even if credentials are stolen, attackers have nowhere to go.

Of course, actually putting that into practice is the hard part. Manual access management is slow and painful, and cutting privileges too aggressively risks hurting productivity. And as cloud environments and NHIs multiply, keeping up manually just isn’t realistic anymore.

How Apono Helps

Apono makes it simple to put Zero Standing Privileges into action—without slowing anyone down.

Here’s how:

• Automatically discovers and remediates standing privileges across both human and non-human identities
  
• Delivers Just-in-Time (JIT) access, granting permissions only when needed and revoking them immediately after use
  
• Reduces Non-Human Identity (NHI) privileges safely, using automated rightsizing via quarantining and reversible remediation that preserves uptime and avoids breaking integrations
  
• Centralizes and automates governance, unifying policies across cloud, on-prem, and AI-driven systems
  
• Supports Zero Trust initiatives, enforcing short-lived, least-privileged access without adding friction for engineers

With Apono, security teams can close privilege gaps before attackers can exploit them, while developers and AI systems get access exactly when—and only when—they need it.

Ready to take a smarter approach to cloud access?

See how Apono can help your organization prevent credential-based attacks while keeping teams fast and productive. Visit apono.io/jit-and-jep/ to learn more about our platform or request a demo.

Imagine autonomous agents negotiating and acting on your behalf—no manual hand-offs, just an efficient, policy‑driven communication. That’s the promise of Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, unveiled at Google Cloud Next in April 2025. Developed with input from over 50 partners, A2A is now open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and governed by the Linux Foundation.

But excitement quickly collides with reality. Early adopters report compliance blind spots (who approved that token and when?), latency added by cross-agent orchestration, and the operational overhead of adding another standard into pipelines. As agent-based architectures become the backbone of AI-driven automation, the pressure is mounting on engineering teams to enable secure, autonomous interactions between services. 

A 2025 global AI survey reveals that 29% of enterprises are already running agentic AI in production, with another 44% planning to join them within a year. Cost-cutting and reducing manual workloads are among the top goals for adoption. Understanding the Agent2Agent Protocol is vital for building secure and scalable systems that can keep up with the next wave of automation.

What is the Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol?

Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol is an open, vendor-neutral language that lets independent AI agents discover each other, negotiate how they will talk (text, files, streams), and work together without exposing their private code or data. 

Google unveiled the spec on April 9, 2025, at Cloud Next. It is backed by more than 50 technology partners and is now maintained as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license.

Google kicked the A2A project off after running large, multi-agent systems for customers and seeing the same pain points repeat:

• Brittle one-off integrations.
• Security gaps.
• No common way for agents from different vendors to “shake hands.”

How does the Agent2Agent Protocol work?

The four-step flow below illustrates the full A2A handshake from discovery to streaming task updates.

1. Discovery with an Agent Card

Every agent publishes a tiny JSON file, /.well-known/agent.json, listing its name, endpoint, skills, and supported auth flows. A client agent simply fetches this card (directly or via a registry) to see who can do what and how to connect.

2. Auth in Micro-slices

The card also tells the caller which OAuth 2/OIDC method to use. The client obtains a short-lived token (minutes), allowing access to be scoped and automatically expires. This step eliminates hardcoded secrets, marking a shift from static secrets to dynamic machine identity management, where each agent authenticates based on policy, context, and lifespan.

3. Task Exchange Over Web Standards

With a token in hand, the client sends a task/send or task/sendSubscribe request via JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTPS.

• Synchronous work:task/send returns the answer right away.
• Long-running work:task/sendSubscribe opens a Server-Sent Events (SSE) stream so the remote agent can push status and partial results. Tasks move through states (submitted → working → completed) and can include messages or artifacts (files, JSON blobs, images).

4. Built-in Observability

Each request/response carries trace IDs, and agents emit structured logs and metrics in OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) format. You can drop A2A traffic straight into existing dashboards without bolting on a separate telemetry layer. This level of observability is essential for identifying anomalies and containing the risks of non-human identities operating in complex, distributed environments.

Many teams adopting A2A have struggled with blind spots, like losing track of which agents initiated sensitive operations or where tokens are reused across flows. Without built-in tracing and structured logs, auditing multi-agent systems becomes a fragmented, manual task. A2A’s observability layer helps reduce that operational burden, but it still requires thoughtful integration with existing security tooling.

What is the Agent2Agent Protocol designed to do?

At its core, A2A gives every software agent a common language and contract so they can:

• Discover one another without manual registry updates.
• Exchange tasks securely with scoped tokens and auditable IDs.
• Stream real-time results (via SSE) from remote agents for both quick jobs and long-running workflows.

By replacing brittle webhooks and custom RPC layers with an open JSON-RPC spec, the Agent2Agent Protocol eliminates glue code and reduces integration overhead across ecosystems.

Because discovery, auth, transport, and telemetry are part of the spec, you don’t waste cycles reinventing service discovery, API gateways, or audit pipelines. You wire agents together (much like microservices), then layer governance tools on top to enforce least-privilege, time-boxed access across your infra. It reduces repetitive integration tasks, which improves developer productivity across teams working in complex environments.

Why is the Agent2Agent Protocol a good thing?

The Agent2Agent Protocol solves real pain points in DevOps and automation by making agent communication smarter and safer. Here’s why it’ll be beneficial in the long run.

Plug-and-Play Interoperability

Any AI agent that speaks A2A can call, or be called by, any other agent.

Example: If a vulnerability scanner agent discovers a patch management agent during a CI run, it can send a task with the CVE list and stream the fix status back to the build.

Built-in Security

Short-lived OAuth/OIDC tokens and signed task IDs keep access scoped and auditable without requiring the hardcoding of secrets.

Example: When a monitoring bot detects a spike, it requests a one-off token to spin up extra pods. The token expires automatically once scaling is complete, aligning with enterprise identity management best practices.

Less Glue Code, Faster Pipelines

The Agent2Agent Protocol includes built-in support for agent discovery, JSON-RPC 2.0 transport, and SSE streaming. Teams can focus on features instead of writing adapters and polling loops.

Example: A scheduler agent queries rightsizing agents in AWS, GCP, and Azure, aggregates savings, and opens a single cost-cutting PR. No polling scripts are required.

Enterprise-Grade Observability

Every request carries trace IDs and standard OTLP metrics, which are dropped straight into Grafana/Prometheus dashboards, regardless of whether those agents are operating in the cloud, across edge services, or in traditional data centers.

Example: A chatbot passes a billing request to a payment agent via A2A; the handoff is fully logged, and the one-time token expires as soon as the charge is completed.

Agent2Agent Protocol Design Principles

These guiding principles explain why A2A stays flexible, secure, and developer-friendly as the ecosystem expands.

• Agent Cards for zero-config discovery: Every agent publishes a small JSON file at /.well-known/agent.json that lists its endpoint, skills, and auth method.
• Standard JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTPS: Requests (tasks/send) and responses travel as JSON-RPC messages on plain HTTPS, so agents in any language interoperate through existing API gateways or mTLS proxies.
• Built-in auth with short-lived tokens: Tokens scoped per task and expiring in minutes eliminate long-lived secrets while integrating with enterprise SSO, a key cybersecurity best practice for identity-aware systems and zero trust architectures.
• Flexible interaction patterns: Uses a blocking call for quick answers and tasks/sendSubscribe for long tasks. Gives real-time updates via Server-Sent Events (SSE). Agents can even push webhooks for fully async workflows.
• Rich, multimodal data exchange: A single task can bundle text, JSON, files, images, or audio as separate “parts,” allowing agents pass artifacts logs, screenshots, CSVs without inventing new MIME schemes.
• Versioning & vendor-neutral extensibility: The spec includes a compatibility flag so new features roll out without breaking older agents. The A2A Apache-2.0 license prevents any one vendor from locking the rest out. On July 31, 2025, A2A version 0.3 was released—adding gRPC support, signed security cards, and extended Python SDK support; the protocol now counts over 150 supported organizations.

How to Adopt the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol in 6 Practical Steps

Follow this step-by-step guide to adopt your first A2A agents and weave them safely into your workflow.

Step 1: Install the Sample Toolkit

Clone Google’s reference repo and drop it into the Python SDK.

git clone https://github.com/a2aproject/a2a-samples.git
cd a2a-samples
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install a2a-python            # or a2a-js for Node

The repo includes basic example agents and lightweight helper code for JSON-RPC calls and SSE streaming, but production implementations will need hardening.

Step 2: Launch a Demo Agent

Pick one of the ready-made agents (e.g., the “currency” FastAPI service) and run it.

uvicorn samples.python.currency_agent:app --port 10000 --reload

When the server starts, it auto-serves an Agent Card at: https://localhost:10000/.well-known/agent.json, advertising its skills and auth method. 

Step 3: Expose the Agent Card

Make that JSON file reachable via a public URL, an internal LB, or a registry entry. Other agents can pull it and learn who you are and how to talk. No extra service-discovery layer is required. For production environments, agents can also publish to a centralized A2A registry, which supports indexed search and simplifies discovery across large infrastructures.

Step 4: Hook in Short-Lived Auth

Edit the auth block in the Agent Card to point at your OIDC or token issuer and set the TTL to minutes. Every task call will now carry a scoped, self-expiring token instead of a long-lived secret.

Step 5: Send a Task and Stream the Result

From another agent (or just curl), invoke the first agent:

TOKEN=$(<your_token_here> --ttl 5m --aud currency-agent)
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
     -X POST https://currency-agent:10000/tasks/sendSubscribe \
     -d '{"input":{"amount":"50","from":"USD","to":"JPY"}}'

The request uses JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTPS; the sendSubscribe variant opens a Server-Sent Events stream, so you get live status until completed.

Step 6: Watch the Traces

The SDK emits OTLP logs/metrics with a shared trace ID. Point OTLP logs and metrics to your backend of choice for unified observability.

Security Automation for Safe A2A Implementation

The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol enables software agents to trade tasks and data on the fly, but it truly shines when access is tightly controlled and fully auditable. Apono and the A2A Protocol share a key mission: enabling secure, policy-driven access between non-human identities (NHIs) like service accounts, bots, and APIs. Apono ensures that, even as NHIs interoperate across boundaries, their access is ephemeral, precisely scoped, and compliant. 

Apono’s platform is purpose-built to manage access for NHIs by enforcing Just-In-Time (JIT) and Just-Enough-Privilege (JEP) access, thereby reducing standing privileges and misconfigurations. It ensures every service account, bot, or API key gets only the access it needs for exactly as long as it’s needed. 

Apono is designed to become the enforcer of orchestrated permissions across infrastructure by automating and right-sizing the lifecycle of access for NHIs—including provisioning, expiration, and auditability—to install least privilege for NHIs and bring zero trust to all of your identities. 

With Apono’s auto-expiring tokens and centralized logs, you can narrow the window for misuse and provide security teams with a single source of truth when compliance and auditing questions arise.

Get hands-on with Apono. Request a demo to deploy in under 15 minutes and start eliminating overprivileged access.

The Access Management Dilemma in Hybrid Environments

Security and engineering teams today face a tough balance: protecting sensitive resources while keeping developers productive. As organizations shift from on-prem to the cloud, access management becomes one of the biggest challenges.

With more identities—human and non-human—gaining access to more resources across hybrid environments, the risks rise. Studies show that over 95% of identities hold excessive privileges, and attackers are exploiting this reality, with 88% of breaches starting from compromised identities.

It’s natural for engineering teams to want to “build” their own Just-in-Time (JIT) access solution. But is that really the best use of resources? Increasingly, organizations are asking themselves:

Should we build an in-house solution or buy a platform that delivers secure, scalable JIT access out-of-the-box?

This article explores the trade-offs of building vs. buying so you can make the right choice for your organization.

The Real Costs of Building Your Own JIT Access Management

Rolling your own JIT solution sounds simple, but in practice, it’s often a patchwork of services, scripts, and ongoing maintenance.

What it takes to build:

• Provisioning logic: Microservices or Lambdas to trigger access grants/revocations.
• Rules engine: Custom service to decide who can request what.
• Integrations: Connectors for each cloud, app, and service.
• Role management: Mining roles, setting up RBAC, auditing usage.

The hidden cost:

• Every API change or new service means potentially new engineering work, requiring design, development and testing.
• DIY systems are usually scoped for niche apps. Not broad coverage leaving huge gaps including how to support the rest of the identity fabric and related tools.
• Continuous upkeep and testing drains developer time and slows agility.

In short, the challenge isn’t just building. It’s maintaining, its testing, its patching and scanning for vulnerabilities. It’s having a team to support you.  

💡 Thinking about building your own solution?
See how leading teams evaluate Cloud PAM platforms before they commit. Download the Access Platform Buyer’s Guide here

Build vs Buy Comparison Table

Factor	Build In-House	Buy a Platform (General)	Apono Advantage
Speed to Deploy	Months to design, develop, and test, resulting in a slower time-to-value.	Typically faster deployment with vendor-provided integrations and support.	API-first deployment with Terraform, Helm, CloudFormation; Slack/Teams-native workflows for fast adoption.
Role Creation Model	Often depends on pre-created roles — slow to adapt, prone to over/under-privilege.	Many solutions offer role management, which may require predefined roles or templates.	Dynamic roles created in real time, scoped to the task, auto-expire, and adapt automatically to business context.
Coverage	Limited to your team’s integration work; gaps likely in multi-cloud/SaaS.	Most vendors offer coverage across major cloud and SaaS platforms, but breadth and depth can vary.	Comprehensive support across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, SaaS, and NHIs; single-pane-of-glass management.
Operational Overhead	Continuous upkeep for API changes, security patches, and policy logic.	Vendor-managed updates and maintenance help reduce the burden on internal teams.	Fully vendor-managed with continuous support for new APIs; automated discovery reduces admin effort.
Customization	Fully tailored to unique workflows and niche systems.	Platforms typically offer policy frameworks and workflow flexibility, though some adjustments may be needed.	Granular Access Flows and contextual policies, easily adapted to customer workflows without brittle custom code.
Security Posture	Risk of drift if roles aren’t updated quickly; harder to keep least privilege.	Most platforms provide controls for enforcing least privilege, although they are often tied to predefined structures.	Real-time context evaluation ensures least privilege with just-in-time and just-enough access; supports NHI quarantine.
Slack / Jira Integration	Requires custom development and ongoing maintenance.	Many platforms offer some integrations, with varying depths.	Deep Slack, Teams, and Jira integrations for request → approve → provision flows.
Auto-Expiring Roles	Must be built and maintained manually with custom scripts.	Some vendors provide time-limited role options.	Native auto-expiring, context-aware roles scoped to the task.
Audit Logging	Logs are often fragmented across different systems, requiring manual correlation.	Platforms provide centralized logging, but the depth can vary.	Unified session auditing with identity-to-action tracking, SIEM & ticketing integration.
Deployment	Complex build-out requiring internal engineering resources.	Vendor platforms usually offer guided setup and professional services.	Fast, API-based deployment with pre-built integrations and self-service rollout.

Apono’s Secure by Design Architecture

They say never roll your own crypto—because with great power comes great responsibility. The same applies to JIT access. It holds the keys to your most sensitive crown jewels, so protecting it must be a top priority.

Whether it’s a Lambda function or another microservice handling provisioning, it carries a lot of permissions. The real question: how are you ensuring it can’t be compromised, thereby handing attackers the keys to the kingdom?

Apono’s patented secure architecture keeps your environment fully in your control. Our platform runs on two lightweight components:

• The Web App – where admins create and manage access flows. It never touches your data or resources.
  
• The Connector – deployed inside your cloud, fully under your control, executing only pre-defined actions and never storing secrets.
  

Why it matters:

• No data exposure – Apono never reads your files, code, or datasets.
  
• Secrets stay secret – Credentials are pulled directly from your cloud’s secret store and never cached.
  
• Always available – High-availability design ensures access flows keep running without downtime.
  
• Compliance built-in – Password resets and credential rotation are enforced automatically.
  

With Apono, all access stays in your environment—you get secure, reliable, and compliant access management without friction.

What Engineering Leaders Are Choosing

Monday.com transitioned from maintenance-heavy in-house workflows to a secure, scalable, and developer-friendly platform—powered by Apono

ROI at Scale

• 14,600+ developer hours saved per year through instant, auto-approved access.
• 3,800+ DevOps hours saved per year by eliminating manual access handling.
• 18,000+ hours reclaimed annually while strengthening compliance and reducing risk.

ROI Of Your Internal Resources Is On What You Can Sell

If you’re managing access to a niche or one-off resource, building something in-house might feel tempting. But the reality is that most teams quickly learn the cost is higher than the benefit: ongoing maintenance, constant patching, compliance reviews, and dedicating precious engineering cycles to “plumbing” instead of product.

Modern teams need speed, security, and scalability—not another internal project to babysit. A proven cloud-native JIT access management solution delivers reliability out of the box, reduces risk, and frees your engineers to do what they do best: ship value to customers.

Don’t Build What You Could Buy Smarter.

Download the Buyer’s Guide to learn how leading security teams compare Cloud PAM platforms — and why Apono is built for speed, scale, and Zero Standing Privilege.

Today’s man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks go far beyond coffee-shop Wi-Fi: they target browsers, APIs, device enrollments, and DNS infrastructure. Using automated proxykits and supply-chain flaws, attackers hijack session cookies, tokens, and device credentials—turning one interception into persistent, high-value access.

Concerningly, these are not edge cases. Automated cyber threat activity surged 16.7%, with over 1.7 billion stolen credentials circulating on the dark web—fueling a 42% increase in credential-based targeted attacks. Passwords and simple MFA fail unless access is limited and continually verified.

Security teams can implement best practices, such as cutting token lifetimes and just-in-time elevation, to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks. Let’s review a comprehensive list of security controls you can implement immediately to make intercepted credentials worthless to attackers.

What are man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks?

A man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack happens when an attacker secretly intercepts and manipulates communications between two parties. The attacker is positioned in the “middle” of the data exchange, between a user and an app, or between two users or two apps, without anyone noticing. With MitM attacks, the adversary can eavesdrop, steal credentials, alter data, or impersonate one of the parties involved.

Today’s MitM attacks target API calls, machine-to-machine traffic, and even naive agent-to-agent protocols in distributed, cloud-native environments. With stolen tokens or cookies, an attacker gains the same level of visibility and control as a legitimate service account.

Some examples of MitM techniques include:

• Eavesdropping/sniffing: Capturing unencrypted traffic (credentials, config).
• Message tampering: Altering data in transit (API responses, payloads).
• Session & credential theft: Stealing cookies, tokens, or certs to impersonate users/services.

A successful man-in-the-middle adversary gains the same level of visibility and control as the legitimate user or service. Non-human identities (NHIs)—like service accounts, workloads, and agents—are particularly vulnerable. In fact, machine identities now outnumber human identities by as much as 80:1, multiplying the blast radius of a single interception. Without a strong enterprise identity management strategy, these identities are often left overprivileged and unmonitored, creating an easy path for MitM attackers.

7 Man in the Middle (MitM) Attacks to Look Out For, Plus Security Best Practices 

MitM attacks aren’t just theoretical risks; they can be the cause behind real breaches or even large-scale espionage campaigns. Let’s review the most relevant attack types that DevOps and engineering need to watch out for.

1. Classic HTTPS Spoofing and SSL Stripping

Attackers downgrade HTTPS connections to plain HTTP, eliminating the security layer of SSL/TLS. This attack vector leaves communication in plaintext, including login credentials, API keys, and session tokens. Misconfigured certificates, outdated systems, or user dismissal of browser warnings leave room for SSL stripping. DevOps teams are especially concerned about this in CI/CD pipelines and API endpoints, as a single misconfigured connection can become the entry point of a MitM attacker.

Example: The 2015 Superfish adware fiasco showed how software that installed its own root certificate could intercept HTTPS traffic by trusting a single private key. Because those certificates shared a key, anyone with the key could impersonate sites (including banks) without browser warnings.

Security best practices:

• Enforce TLS 1.3 across all applications and services.
• Use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to prevent downgrade attempts.
• Automate certificate renewal and rotation to reduce the risk of expired or misconfigured certificates.
• Build a structured validation plan to ensure TLS configurations and certificate management are consistently tested across environments.

2. DNS Spoofing (Cache Poisoning)

DNS hijacks and registrar compromises let attackers redirect entire domains to malicious infrastructure.

Example: Sea Turtle was a sophisticated espionage operation uncovered in 2019. Attackers targeted domain registrars, registries, and other DNS infrastructure to compromise DNS records and surreptitiously redirect traffic for targeted organizations to attacker-controlled servers. It allowed the attacker to intercept web and email traffic, steal credentials, and even serve forged or fraudulently issued TLS certificates to avoid immediate detection.

Security best practices:

• Enforce DNSSEC and monitor DNS records via passive-DNS feeds (alert on unexpected delegations).
• Lock registrar accounts with MFA and role separation; require multi-person approval for DNS changes.
• Use certificate transparency and automated cert monitoring to detect fraudulent issuance quickly.
• Use a cloud-native access management platform that limits what compromised DNS traffic can expose, since JIT access makes sensitive tokens and API keys time-bound.

So, what would these best practices look like in practice? Let’s look at an example. Caris Life Sciences used Apono to enforce JIT folder-level permissions in AWS S3—so even if DNS traffic were redirected, attackers couldn’t leverage long-lived standing credentials.

3. ARP Spoofing in Internal Networks (LAN-level MitM)

Attackers poison ARP tables on local networks to force traffic to flow through a malicious host, enabling sniffing and tampering with internal traffic.

Example: Pentest and tool writeups repeatedly show that cheap implants (like Wi-Fi Pineapple and Raspberry Pi) enable LAN ARP attacks. Effective data center management, such as strict network segmentation, helps reduce exposure to LAN-level MitM attacks. 

Security best practices:

• Segment east-west traffic using VLANs and microsegmentation.
• Deploy IDS/IPS rules for ARP anomalies and enable switch port security (sticky MACs, BPDU guard).
• Encrypt internal service traffic (mTLS) so LAN sniffing yields little usable data.
• Microsegmentation plus JIT permissions ensures that even if lateral movement is attempted, overprivileged standing access isn’t available.

4. Wi-Fi Eavesdropping & Rogue Access Points (Evil-Twin attacks)

Threat actors use evil twin or malicious hotspots to steal users and proxy or intercept their traffic. This type of attack happens frequently in airports, public charging points, cafes, and hotels.

Example: In July 2024, Australian police arrested an individual for operating an “evil twin” hotspot that harvested travellers’ credentials by redirecting victims to spoofed login pages.

Security best practices:

• Enforce VPN and device posture scans on all non-trusted networks; disable auto-join for enterprise devices.
• Educate staff to verify SSIDs and employ certificate-pinned applications on high-value services.
• Enforce 802.1X/enterprise Wi-Fi with device certificates and scan for duplicate SSIDs on the network.
• Integrate network posture scanning with JIT access to sensitive assets so access from high-risk networks is denied or further challenged.

5. Session Hijacking/Token Replay (Stolen Cookies & API Keys)

Attackers replay stolen session cookies, tokens, or API keys to impersonate services or users, often without passwords. Stolen cookies and tokens don’t just result from MitM attacks; client-side flaws like cross-site scripting (XSS) can also expose session data and API keys, as seen in CVE-2024-44308. 

Example: In the Microsoft SAS Token Leak (2023), researchers inadvertently published a Shared Access Signature token granting full access to an Azure Storage account and exposing 38TB of sensitive data. This NHI breach showed the risks of over-permissive, long-lived tokens.

Security best practices:

• Ensure all tokens and permissions are short-lived, scoped, and auto-expiring. That way, even if an attacker captures a valid token, it becomes useless almost immediately.
• Use device-bound tokens or certificate-based device auth.
• Detect impossible travel/concurrent sessions and trigger immediate token revocation.
• A cloud-native access management platform (like Apono) ensures all permissions are short-lived, scoped, and auto-expiring. A stolen token from an intercepted session becomes useless within minutes.

6. Agent-to-Target Hijacks (Compromised Agents & Telemetry)

An attacker with network access (or who exploits a vulnerability in an agent) can intercept or impersonate the agent to server telemetry and commands, hijacking workflows and observability channels.

Example: The Okta Support System Breach in 2023 saw attackers exploit a compromised NHI (a service account) to steal support artifacts containing customer credentials. Additionally, CVE-2025-1146 (CrowdStrike Falcon Linux component) illustrates how TLS validation bugs can enable MitM of agent to cloud traffic. 

A potential MiTM attack exploiting this flaw could trick the vulnerable CrowdStrike sensor into accepting a malicious, non-legitimate server certificate. This attack would allow the attacker to intercept, decrypt, and manipulate the secure communication between the sensor and the CrowdStrike cloud, potentially compromising system confidentiality and integrity.

Security best practices:

• Enforce strict TLS validation and mTLS for agent-to-cloud links.
• Limit agent privileges; require JIT elevation for sensitive operations.
• Log agent activity and alert on anomalous command sequences.
• Apono enforces JIT approvals on sensitive agent actions, so even a compromised agent account cannot escalate beyond its narrowly scoped, temporary role.

7. Naive Agent-to-Agent Protocols (Weak Inter-Agent Auth)

Simpler or unrecorded agent-to-agent protocols without mutual authentication or request signing enable MitM between agents and services in distributed systems. Such attacks may include context poisoning, agent impersonation, or exploiting an AI agent’s logic.

Example: Microsoft’s Taxonomy of Failure Modes in Agentic AI Systems warns how impostor agents could intercept agent communications. The research shows that an attacker could introduce an impostor AI agent, such as an impostor “email assistant,” into a network of cooperating agents. This malicious actor would then have the capability to intercept and alter legitimate communication between other actors, such that the attacker can inject new instructions and pilfer sensitive data without intervening directly by any human user.

Security best practices:

• Mandate mutual TLS and cryptographic signing for agent-to-agent calls; mandate strict key rotation.
• Adopt centralized identity for services (machine identities), per-call authorization, and least-privilege policies.
• Validate request provenance and use replay protection (nonces/timestamps) in protocols.
• Machine identity management should be centralized. JIT per-call permissions prevent overprivileged service accounts from being an ongoing MitM target.
• A cloud-native access management platform like Apono manages machine identities and issues per-call JIT access, ensuring overprivileged service accounts aren’t a standing MitM target.

Where legacy PAM relies on static roles and vault proxies, leaving windows of opportunity open for MitM actors, Apono operationalizes Zero Standing Privilege. That means every credential, token, or role is short-lived, scoped, and continuously verified—dramatically reducing the blast radius of a single interception.

Short-Lived Access, Long-Lasting Security With Apono

Man-in-the-middle attacks typically succeed when stolen credentials or tokens remain useful. The fastest prevention isn’t perfect encryption; it’s limiting how much data of value an attacker has. Make sessions transient, bind tokens to device and context, and identify proxying traffic so stolen credentials will decay or be revoked right away.

Operationally, focus on three levers: mandate phishing-immune MFA and device-bound authentication; use short-lived, auto-rotating tokens with per-call authorization and mTLS for traffic to services; and put high-risk activities behind human approvals and quick revocation playbooks. These steps keep attackers from turning a fleeting interception into a sustained breach.

Stolen tokens expire within minutes with Apono, preventing attackers from turning an interception into sustained access. Permissions expire automatically, machine identities are scoped per-call, and sensitive actions require approvals. Apono is built specifically for this approach: JIT access, automatically decaying permissions, scoped control over agents, and full audit trails reduce the blast radius in case of interceptions. See how temporary access turns the tables. Apono operationalizes zero trust by eliminating standing privileges across human and machine identities.

Book a demo and start making stolen credentials useless before they can be weaponized.

Identity-related threats are draining time and resources faster than security teams can keep up. The challenge is no longer just about stopping breaches; it’s about keeping up with the scale of alerts and risks. 

On average, organizations spend 11 person-hours investigating each identity-related security alert. Meanwhile, credential theft has soared 160% in 2025, making privileged accounts and non-human identities (NHIs) a prime target for attackers. 

Modern Privileged Access Management Software Solutions (PAM) offer a way forward by automating access controls and reducing standing privileges, filling the gaps left by traditional approaches and securing your organization. 

What are privileged access management software solutions?

Privileged Access Management software secures and controls access to high-value accounts like admin users and NHIs—basically any accounts that hold the keys to critical infrastructure. These solutions enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that users and services only get the access they need, for the minimum time required.

PAM software centralizes and automates access workflows, such as vaulting credentials, issuing short-lived tokens, monitoring privileged sessions, and enforcing policies like Just-in-Time (JIT) access. These tools provide many big ticks for security and compliance, such as creating audit trails for frameworks like SOC 2 and GDPR. 

The need for PAM solutions is especially critical in today’s cloud environments, where non-human identities outnumber human users by more than 80:1. For example, instead of leaving a cloud service account (an NHI) with standing database or API security permissions, PAM tools can issue time-bound credentials only when that service is actively running a job.

Benefits of Privileged Access Management Software Solutions

Effective PAM platforms deliver more than protection—they streamline access and ensure that even machine-to-machine credentials are properly governed.

• Reduces security risk: Eliminates excessive or standing privileges, protecting against credential theft and identity-based attacks, especially those targeting non-human identities (e.g., API keys and bots).
• Improves visibility into non-human identities: Discovers, monitors, and governs machine-to-machine credentials and Agent2Agent workflows that are often overlooked but frequently exploited.
• Improves efficiency: Automates provisioning and revocation, removing ticket queues and giving developers on-demand and time-bound access via familiar tools like Slack.
• Simplifies compliance: Generates detailed audit logs and automated reports to meet requirements like HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, and CCPA. Usually includes governance across critical workloads like data management and storage environments. 
• Supports scalability: Manages access consistently across thousands of users, apps, and cloud environments without slowing teams down.

Key Features of Privileged Access Management Software Solutions

To understand why PAM is critical today, let’s look at what these solutions actually do and how they work.

• Just-in-Time (JIT) access: Issues temporary, auto-expiring permissions so users and services only have access when needed.
• Credential vaulting & rotation: Securely stores privileged credentials and automatically rotates them to prevent reuse or compromise.
• Session monitoring & auditing: Records privileged activity for visibility, forensic analysis, and compliance reporting.
• Granular policy enforcement: Applies least-privilege access controls at a fine-grained level—down to databases, APIs, Kubernetes clusters, and environments used for AI code generation and automated builds. 
• Machine identity management: Discovers, governs, and secures credentials for service accounts, APIs, and other NHIs across cloud and DevOps environments.

How to Choose the Right Privileged Access Management Software Solution

When comparing PAM tools, it’s important to balance security with usability and scalability. Here are key factors to guide your decision-making.

• Prioritize automation: Look for tools that offer JIT access, automated provisioning, and credential rotation to minimize human error and manual overhead.
• Check integration coverage: Ensure the PAM solution integrates seamlessly with your cloud providers, CI/CD pipelines, and collaboration tools like Slack or Teams. The solution should also scale governance across both human and machine identities. 
• Assess compliance support: Verify that the PAM solution provides detailed audit logs, reporting, and policy controls to simplify SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and broader data security compliance.

🔍 Compare PAM Platforms with Confidence
Turn your shortlist into a smart choice. See the capabilities that matter for AI workloads, Zero Standing Privilege, and NHI governance. Download the 2025 Access Platform Buyer’s Guide here

Top 10 Privileged Access Management Software Solutions

1. StrongDM 

StrongDM is a zero trust PAM platform that centralizes access across infrastructure, such as servers, databases, Kubernetes, cloud, and SaaS. Its key features include access policies and capturing session data for audits and compliance. 

Main Features:

• JIT access and credential automation 
• Records SSH, RDP, Kubernetes, and database sessions for auditing 
• Utilises a Cedar‑based policy engine for context-aware access control

Price: Starts at $70/user/month. 

Review: “Their platform is intuitive and highly secure, which makes it easy for us to recommend to clients across industries.”

2. Apono

Apono is a cloud-native access management solution built to eliminate standing privileges and reduce identity-based risks without slowing developers down. While most PAM solutions still rely on vaults and manual workflows, Apono eliminates these bottlenecks with a cloud-native, Just-in-Time model built for scale. It deploys in less than 15 minutes and integrates with developer-friendly tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and CLI, making secure access simple and scalable. 

Main Features:

• Granular policy enforcement: Enables fine-grained access down to individual databases, APIs, and cloud resources, with flexible approval workflows.
• Automated JIT access: Issues time-bound, auto-expiring permissions so users and non-human identities (like service accounts and APIs, etc) get access only when needed.
• Break-glass and on-call flows: Pre-configured emergency access workflows ensure teams can remediate incidents quickly.
• Comprehensive audit logs and reporting: Delivers full visibility into who accessed what, when, and why to simplify audits.
• Self-serve access requests: Empowers developers to request and receive access instantly via Slack, Teams, or CLI.

Price: Tailored pricing depending on team size and infrastructure complexity. A free trial is available, and enterprise-grade plans are available upon request.

Review: “Apono’s product does exactly what it claims to […] it saves me time, and provides value to my users by streamlining the process of granting access to our resources in a precise, auditable way.”

3. Heimdal Privileged Access Management 

Heimdal Privileged Access Management is a comprehensive PAM module that enables JIT elevation and automatic de-escalation of user rights. It’s embedded within Heimdal’s broader cybersecurity suite. 

Main Features:

• Zero‑trust execution and threat‑driven session termination
• Integration with Heimdal’s broader security suite for centralized governance
• Granular access control via role-based permissions

Price: By inquiry. 

Review: “While the solution can be complex to implement and manage, the benefits it provides in terms of enhanced security and improved efficiency are worth the investment.”

4. Wallix Bastion 

The Wallix Bastion PAM platform integrates password vaulting, session management, and access control, including HTML5 web sessions, with full video and metadata audits.

Main Features:

• Centralized credential management with automatic rotation
• Supports agentless, browser-based access (no VPN/fat client needed)
• Secure machine-to-machine password handling via APIs

Price: User- or resource-based pricing available, starting at around $103/month for 10-50 users. 

Review: “The setup process was simple, and the solution can be implemented within less than one day.”

5. ARCON Privileged Access Management 

ARCON PAM is an enterprise-grade solution delivering granular control over privileged identities and environments. It supports various features, from adaptive authentication to session monitoring and secrets management. 

Main Features: 

• Auto-discovers and onboards identities across AD, AWS/Azure/GCP
• Supports SSO, MFA, and microservices-based deployments on-prem or SaaS
• Securely vaults and rotates credentials (including SSH keys)

Price: By inquiry.

Review: “The UI has improved significantly over the past year, making navigation and policy configuration easier.”

6. Segura 360° Privilege Platform

Segura 360° Privilege Platform is an all-in-one PAM suite that spans the entire privileged access lifecycle. It covers password vaulting, DevOps secrets management, session recording, cloud identity governance, and more. 

Main Features: 

• Fast deployment in as little as seven minutes
• Full privileged access lifecycle coverage
• Grants time-limited permissions with JIT access

Price: All-inclusive licensing model available by inquiry. 

Review: “The standout aspects are ease of use, robust security layers (MFA included), and excellent customer support.”

7. ManageEngine Password Manager Pro 

This option is often categorized as a Privileged Password Management (PMM) tool rather than a full-featured PAM. Still, ManageEngine offers a centralized, AES-256 encrypted vault for privileged credentials and remote session control. It integrates with Active Directory and CI/CD tools for seamless access governance. 

Main Features: 

• Provides built-in compliance reports (PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR)
• Integrates with AD, LDAP, REST APIs, and ticketing platforms
• Records remote sessions (SSH, RDP) for forensic auditing

Price: 

• Standard Edition: Starting at $595/year (2 admins)
• Premium Edition: Around $1,395/year
• Enterprise Edition: Approximately $3,995/year

Review: “Manage Engine Password Manager Pro is very user-friendly and easy to manage. [I use the] multi-factor authentication with strong encryption methods.”

8. Systancia

Systancia’s PAM solution adapts its control levels based on the task’s criticality, ranging from standard internal administration to high-risk, highly regulated operations. It delivers additional features like contextual session monitoring and secure credential injection. 

Main Features: 

• Adaptive control levels by context, from routine tasks to high-security 
• Enables automated protective actions to halt suspicious activities
• Offers hardened virtual or terminal-based access

Price: By inquiry 

Review: “Systancia Gate and Systancia Cleanroom allow us to implement these accesses very quickly and manage them very simply.”

9. Teleport

Teleport is a cloud-native platform providing PAM through zero trust principles and cryptographic identities. It unifies access across SSH, Kubernetes, databases, web apps, and cloud environments.

Main Features: 

• Supports SSH, Kubernetes, databases, Windows desktops, and cloud apps under one policy plane. 
• JIT, short-lived credentials
• Enforces least-privilege access controls via identity-based policies

Price: Free trial. Pricing is by inquiry. 

Review: “Reviewers highlight centralized access management for SSH, Kubernetes, AWS, and RDS as a standout efficiency.”

10. Netwrix (formerly SecureONE) 

Netwrix’s offering is a PAM platform that replaces standing privileges with just-in-time, ephemeral access. It delivers privileged account discovery, time-limited credentials, real-time session monitoring, and secure remote access without requiring VPNs.

Main Features

• Enables task automation (e.g., password resets, patch deployments)
• Deploys in under a day
• Automatically creates, enables, and cleans up privileged accounts on demand

Price: By inquiry

Review: “[Netwrix is] always very responsive and helpful every time we have an issue. The product itself is also very easy to use.”

Why Apono is Built for Modern Enterprises

Identity-based attacks are rising faster than traditional defenses can adapt, and you can’t afford to expose privileged accounts (human or machine). Modern PAM solutions offer an automation lifeline, cutting down investigation time and providing the audit trails needed for compliance. 

In a world where machine identities outnumber humans and attackers exploit every overlooked credential, Apono delivers a safer and more scalable way to manage privileged access. Get started with Apono today and see how modern PAM can protect your organization without slowing down your teams.

Unlike legacy PAM platforms that rely on static roles, Apono takes a cloud-native, JIT approach. By automating the issuance and revocation of privileges down to individual databases, APIs, or Kubernetes clusters, Apono eliminates standing access and dramatically reduces attack surfaces. Developers can request access through Slack, Teams, or CLI, while security teams gain full visibility through comprehensive audit logs and compliance-ready reporting.

Want to Compare PAM Platforms Side-by-Side?

Before you choose a solution, see how security leaders evaluate Privileged Access Management platforms built for the AI era. Download the Apono Access Platform Buyer’s Guide to learn what differentiates modern, cloud-native PAM from legacy vault-based tools—and how to choose the right platform for your organization.