91% of users log in at their highest level of privilege, which cyber experts see as a symptom of lax IT governance, laziness, and increasingly complex IT environments — and the harbinger of a PAM paradigm shift as NHIs rise.

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91% of users log in at their highest privilege level and stay there, creating significant security and operational risks. This widespread practice stems from complex IT environments, legacy systems without clear ownership, and governance models that haven't kept pace with modern infrastructure. The problem is worsening with the explosion of non-human identities like service accounts, APIs, and CI/CD pipelines that operate continuously with standing access. Traditional PAM and IAM tools struggle with dynamic, ephemeral environments where identities are created programmatically and access requirements change in real-time, signaling a need for paradigm shift toward just-in-time access models.

Always-on privileged access is pervasive — and fraught with risks