PAM Complexity Is Leaving Organizations Exposed

Admin By Request's Paul Fisher on Taming Feature Bloat and Shadow AI Anna Delaney (annamadeline) • March 16, 2026

Privileged access management has grown so complex that many organizations invest in platforms they never fully deploy. Feature bloat, lengthy implementation cycles and heavy consultant dependencies have turned PAM into a governance liability rather than a security asset, said Paul Fisher, head of global cyber strategy at Admin By Request.

See Also: SASE and Zero Trust: The Backbone of Integrated Security (eBook)

Shadow AI sharpens the problem. Agents that end users build and deploy outside IT oversight can't be governed with the same identity paradigms organizations apply to human users or even authorized machine identities. Fisher recommends starting with what's knowable - auditing human privileged users and official agents first - and using endpoint management policies to monitor unauthorized agent activity before deployments scale.

"End users are now playing with Claude ...