Privileged Access Management UAEVaulting, Session Recording & JIT Access

Privileged Access Management is the discipline of vaulting, rotating, monitoring and time-limiting every privileged credential in the estate, plus recording every privileged session for audit. Privileged accounts include domain admins, root, service accounts, cloud-platform admins, database SAs and SaaS super-users. The Verizon DBIR found that 74% of breaches involve a privileged credential. PAM exists to make that attack class economically uninteresting.

In the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management, CyberArk was named a Leader for the seventh consecutive time and positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision. Delinea, BeyondTrust and One Identity Safeguard joined CyberArk in the Leaders quadrant. Saviynt was placed in the Challengers quadrant on the strength of PAM converged with IGA on the Saviynt Identity Cloud. WALLIX, ARCON, Senhasegura and ManageEngine PAM360 were positioned in the Niche or Visionary quadrants.

CyberArk is best in class across all four PAM categories: PASM (privileged account and session management), PEDM (Windows and Mac privilege elevation), RPAM (remote privileged access), and PAM for machines and AI agents. It is trusted by 55% of the Fortune 500 and 10,000+ organisations globally. It offers Privilege Cloud (SaaS) for cloud-first organisations and Self-Hosted for sovereign or air-gapped deployments. Its CORA AI engine surfaces anomalous privileged behaviour in real time. For any ministry, bank, telco, utility, hospital or regulated entity in the UAE, CyberArk is the safe default.

Entra PIM is fit for purpose for low-volume Azure RBAC and Entra role activations. It does not vault SSH credentials, Linux root passwords, network-device credentials, database SA accounts, or service accounts that live outside Azure. It also does not record sessions outside Azure. For any regulated buyer, PIM is a starting point that almost always needs to be paired with a true PAM platform like CyberArk Privilege Cloud or Self-Hosted.

Zero Standing Privileges is the principle that no human or machine identity should hold privileged access at rest. Privilege is granted only when a specific task needs it, only for the duration the task takes, and is revoked automatically. JIT elevation, ephemeral credentials and session brokering operationalise ZSP. It is the most effective single control against credential theft because there is no standing credential left to steal.

Service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, RPA bots, container workloads and AI agents now outnumber humans 50 to 1. Modern PAM platforms (CyberArk Conjur and Secrets Hub, Delinea DevOps Secrets Vault, BeyondTrust DevOps Secrets Safe) discover, vault and rotate these non-human credentials, and broker ephemeral access at runtime so secrets never sit in code, pipelines or container images.

Every one of these frameworks expects documented controls around privileged credential management, segregation of duties, session monitoring and credential rotation. NESA UAE IA explicitly calls for MFA on privileged accounts, vaulting of administrator credentials and session recording. NCA ECC mirrors this for Saudi entities. CBUAE and SAMA add mandatory session recording for banks. ISO 27001 maps to all three. A correctly scoped PAM rollout (CyberArk for the regulated estate, Delinea or BeyondTrust for mid-market, Microsoft PIM as a starting point) operationalises every control these frameworks ask for.

A focused vault for Domain Admins and the top 50 critical service accounts typically reaches production in 8 to 12 weeks. A full-estate rollout including OT systems, database secrets and non-human identity at scale is a 12 to 18 month programme delivered in phases. Artiflex IT scopes PAM in waves so each phase delivers measurable risk and audit reduction value before the next is committed.

Cloud (CyberArk Privilege Cloud, Delinea, Saviynt) suits cloud-first organisations and most commercial enterprises. It removes the operational burden of running the vault and offers faster feature delivery. On-prem (CyberArk Self-Hosted, BeyondTrust) is the right choice for sovereign, air-gapped, OT or defence estates where the vault and recordings must stay inside a regulated boundary. Both deployment models cover the same core PAM functions.

PAM tooling is mature, but PAM operations are the hard part: discovering the privileged estate, designing safe rotation policies, building the workflow for break-glass, integrating with SIEM, and running session-recording reviews. Most in-house teams underestimate the operations effort. Artiflex IT delivers PAM as a co-managed service: the customer keeps governance and approval, we run the vault, the rotation, the session-recording reviews and the integration backlog.