PAM as the Control Plane: Evaluating the Evolution of the PAM Market 

Privileged Access Management (PAM) used to be easier to describe. 

You protected a small set of admin accounts, vaulted credentials, recorded sessions, and called it a day. 

In 2026, the security model hasn't just aged — it's been fundamentally broken. Not because PAM is failing, but because privilege has changed shape. 

Today, privileged actions are increasingly: 

• API calls, not logins 
• performed by non-human identities (NHIs), not just admins 
• triggered continuously by automation and AI agents, not just human sessions 

When the “who” and “how” of privileged activity changes, PAM can’t remain a point product. 

It becomes something bigger: 

A privileged identity access control plane that enforces what’s allowed, in context, at runtime. 

This is one of the central themes in the new report from Software Analyst Cyber Research (SACR): PAM is undergoing a structural shift and is quickly becoming the hardest and most foundational pillar in the modern identity security stack. 

The PAM Reset Isn’t About Features; It’s About the Perimeter Moving 

Most security teams already agree the network perimeter is gone. 

But the practical implication is deeper than “identity is the new perimeter.” It means identity is the only boundary that stays consistent across: 

• cloud resources that spin up and down 
• SaaS admin consoles 
• CI/CD pipelines 
• workloads, service accounts, and API keys 
• emerging agentic systems that can plan and execute actions 

In that world, privileged access becomes the enforcement point because it’s where the most high-impact actions happen: changing infrastructure, altering data, modifying security controls, creating or deleting users. 

That’s why the report frames PAM as central to the identity security stack, surrounded by adjacent pillars (IdP/SSO/MFA, IGA/visibility, identity threat detection/response, and NHI security). Not because those pillars aren’t critical, but because privileges are where breaches take shape. 

Because of this, modern PAM platforms have evolved from secrets management, vaulting, and simple session monitoring and manual approvals. Enterprises need platforms that can:  

• Reduce standing privilege, not just limit access to it. 
• Work across cloud, SaaS, and hybrid environments without becoming a complex deployment project. 
• Support developer and platform workflows without pushing teams into insecure workarounds. 
• Apply least privilege to NHIs and automations as seriously as humans.  
• Extend cleanly into the agentic AI era, where access decisions need runtime guardrails. 

As the report states: the cloud has fundamentally broken the assumptions that traditional PAM was built on. 

Once the industry has realized this, PAM shifts to function as a control plane that provisions access just-in-time, scopes it narrowly, and revokes it automatically. 

The Privilege Expansion Driven by Humans and AI Agents 

One of the sharpest observations in the report is that the fastest growth in privileged users isn’t administrators, it’s non-human identities: service accounts, workloads, CI/CD jobs, certificates, API keys and tokens, and other automation scripts. 

These identities operate continuously and often accumulate broad permissions because governance hasn’t caught up. 

Then agentic AI raises the stakes again. 

Agents aren’t just “another service account.” They can: 

• reason and plan, 
• execute multi-step workflows across systems, 
• change behavior based on context, 
• act at machine speed, 
• and create unexpected outcomes if guardrails are weak or misinterpreted. 

This is why the report argues that privileged access maturity becomes a prerequisite for agentic AI adoption, not a downstream enhancement. 

If your privileged access model can’t enforce runtime boundaries, you don’t just risk over-permissioning. You risk giving autonomous systems durable power in environments where mistakes and misuse compound quickly. 

PAM as a Runtime Control Plane in Practice 

“Modern PAM” is no longer defined by a single feature or deployment pattern. It’s defined by where enforcement happens. 

In control-plane-oriented models, privilege is not something that exists by default and is later constrained. It is something that is created at the moment of execution, evaluated against policy and context, and removed automatically once the task completes. 

This is the architectural direction highlighted in the report’s assessment of Britive. 

Rather than centering PAM on credential custody, Britive is designed around runtime authorization, using native cloud control planes and APIs to mint permissions only when needed, scope them to the task, and revoke them without relying on long-lived privileged accounts. 

The result is a Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) operating model that aligns with how cloud infrastructure, automation, and agentic systems actually behave. 

This approach treats human, non-human, and agentic identities under a unified authorization model. The same policy logic applies whether the actor is a developer requesting elevated access, a CI/CD pipeline provisioning infrastructure, or an AI agent performing a delegated task. This consistency allows PAM to function as a control plane instead of a collection of point controls stitched together. 

By avoiding agents, proxies, and brittle connectors for cloud-native targets, runtime enforcement can be introduced without forcing platform teams into architectural compromises that impede delivery or encourage workarounds. 

In practice, this distinction often determines whether PAM is adopted as a shared foundation or quietly bypassed. 

The PAM Market’s Evolution & Inflection Point 

Cloud ephemerality has made standing privilege unsustainable. 

Non-human identities have made privilege scale beyond manual governance. 

Agentic AI is about to make privilege autonomous. 

These forces are pushing PAM out of its historical role as a compliance-oriented system and into a new one: a privileged identity access control plane that governs high-impact actions in real time. 

The question is no longer whether a platform can vault secrets or record sessions. It’s whether it can create, scope, and revoke privilege dynamically, across environments and identity types, without introducing friction that undermines security outcomes. 

The full analysis from Software Analyst Cyber Research goes deeper into what this shift means for the PAM market in 2026, how different architectural approaches address it, and why platforms like Britive are being evaluated as reference points for this next phase.