Your PAM vendor was acquired. What does that mean for your cloud roadmap?

If you’re an Identity Architect, the recent acquisition news in the Privileged Access Management (PAM) space has likely landed on your desk with a thud. Vendor consolidation always brings a wave of uncertainty about product roadmaps, feature development, and support. For a system as critical as PAM, that uncertainty creates risk.

This is especially true when your existing PAM solution was already being stretched thin by the demands of the cloud. While PAM remains a cornerstone for securing traditional infrastructure, its architecture often hits a wall when faced with the speed and scale of modern cloud-native development. As you plan your next move, it’s the perfect time to ask: will my PAM’s new roadmap align with mine, or will it leave my cloud strategy exposed?

The friction point: where modern PAM meets the cloud-native wall

Even before the acquisition, you were likely feeling the tension. While modern PAM brought just-in-time (JIT) access to the data center, that model doesn’t always translate to the new world of cloud-native development. The friction points are often subtle but significant:

• Ephemeral credentials don’t fit static workflows: PAM excels at managing human access to long-lived servers. But it often struggles to issue and rotate credentials for ephemeral infrastructure like Kubernetes pods or serverless functions that may only exist for a few minutes.
• Developer velocity vs. security friction: In a DevOps world, speed is everything. When developers are slowed down by clunky UI, manual approvals, or tools that don’t integrate into their command line, they are forced to choose between velocity and security. They will almost always choose velocity, leading them to find workarounds or bake in static secrets, creating the very blind spots you’ve worked so hard to eliminate.
• A fragmented view of access: Managing access across a hybrid environment of multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers with a single, PAM-centric view is a challenge. The result is often a fragmented picture of who has access to what, with inconsistent policy enforcement across different environments.

A proposed architecture: Continuous Identity

To solve these modern challenges, we believe a new architectural approach is needed. At SGNL, we call this framework Continuous Identity. It’s not about replacing your PAM; it’s about augmenting it where it hits its limits.

The core thesis of Continuous Identity is shifting from static, pre-provisioned access to dynamic, just-in-time authorization based on real-time context. Here’s how that architectural approach differs:

De-risk your roadmap by augmenting your pam

While your PAM solution plays a vital role in securing your core infrastructure, the uncertainty created by vendor acquisitions presents a clear risk to your cloud-native ambitions. Rather than waiting to see if your vendor’s roadmap will meet your needs, you can de-risk your strategy now.

By augmenting your existing PAM with a solution designed specifically for the complexities of cloud, code, and customer-facing applications, you can build a more resilient, secure, and developer-friendly access management strategy.

Ready to learn more?

Check out SGNL’s Continuous Identity Sessions - a virtual event series where we connect identity practitioners with real-world strategies for building IAM programs that handle today’s machine-speed threats.