What Is the Role of Privileged Access Management in Protecting Sensitive Data?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) plays a crucial role in protecting sensitive data by controlling, monitoring and limiting access to systems and accounts. PAM focuses specifically on managing accounts with elevated permissions, such as administrator or root accounts. These accounts, if compromised or misused, can pose significant security risks and potentially lead to severe data breaches. According to Keeper Security’s Insight Report, 91% of IT leaders surveyed said their PAM solution has given them more control over privileged user activity. To protect sensitive data and improve their overall security posture, organizations must implement a modern PAM solution to secure privileged accounts.

Continue reading to learn why sensitive data is a prime target for cybercriminals and how PAM provides multiple layers of protection to keep it secure.

Why sensitive data is a top target for cybercriminals

Cybercriminals primarily target sensitive data for financial gain. They seek out data that can be sold on the dark web – Personally Identifiable Information (PII), financial records, healthcare data, intellectual property and login credentials – or used directly in fraud or extortion schemes. To maximize impact and payout, cybercriminals often attempt to compromise privileged accounts, which give them broad control over systems and access to large volumes of sensitive information.

For organizations, the consequences of these attacks can be severe. A ransomware attack or data breach can lead to loss of customer trust, reputational damage, regulatory fines and operational downtime. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.8 million in 2024. As these costs continue to rise, organizations must prioritize securing privileged accounts and controlling access to sensitive data. Protecting these accounts is important not only for managing security risks but also for avoiding legal and financial penalties.

How privileged access management protects sensitive data

PAM helps organizations protect sensitive data by providing tools to enforce least-privilege access, manage credentials, monitor sessions, support compliance and limit lateral movement within networks.

Enforces least-privilege access

To minimize risk, organizations should adopt the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) to ensure that users have access only to the resources necessary for their specific roles. PAM solutions support this by enabling IT administrators to enforce Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which assigns permissions based on job function, and to configure Just-In-Time (JIT) access, which provides elevated privileges only when needed and for a limited time. This reduces the number of always-on privileged accounts and helps limit the impact of compromised credentials.

This is especially important in the financial industry, where sensitive systems often contain customer account information or financial transactions that must be tightly controlled. Granting unnecessary or excessive access to these systems increases the risk of data breaches, fraud and compliance violations.

Secures and rotates credentials

Rather than relying on hardcoded, reused or manually managed credentials, PAM solutions allow security teams to centralize credential storage in encrypted vaults and automate password rotation. This reduces the risk of credential reuse and theft, improves visibility across privileged accounts and ensures that access is auditable and policy-driven.

For IT and DevOps teams, PAM significantly reduces the operational complexity of managing privileged credentials across a growing number of systems, tools and environments. Without PAM, privileged credentials are often embedded in scripts, configuration files or shared insecurely among team members, which creates security risks. PAM helps mitigate these risks by enabling teams to replace insecure processes with policy-driven credential management, ensuring that credentials are securely stored, rotated and accessed only by authorized users. This not only reduces the chance of credential theft but also ensures that sensitive data is protected by limiting access to only those who truly need it.

Monitors and logs privileged sessions

A PAM solution tracks and records privileged sessions, giving organizations full visibility into who accessed sensitive systems and what actions were performed. Privileged session management helps security teams prevent unauthorized access and privilege misuse by enabling real-time detection of suspicious activity. PAM also allows security teams to maintain a detailed audit trail that can be used for investigations and compliance reporting.

In healthcare, PAM plays a direct role in protecting Protected Health Information (PHI). For instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that access to PHI be logged and auditable to ensure that only authorized users can view or modify it. By enforcing strict access controls and recording all privileged sessions, PAM helps organizations in any industry prevent data breaches, detect compliance violations and ensure that sensitive data remains protected.

Supports regulatory compliance

Regulations across industries require organizations to actively protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, privilege misuse and data breaches. PAM plays an essential role in helping organizations remain compliant with these requirements by enforcing strict controls over privileged accounts, monitoring privileged access and generating detailed audit trails. 

Here’s how PAM helps organizations comply with specific regulations by protecting sensitive data:

• HIPAA (Healthcare): HIPAA mandates the protection of PHI by limiting access to patient data and maintaining detailed logs of who accessed what and when. PAM enables healthcare organizations to enforce RBAC, track privileged sessions and generate audit trails to ensure PHI is accessible only to authorized users.
• SOX and GLBA (Financial Services): Both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) require strict access controls to protect sensitive financial data and maintain data integrity. PAM allows financial institutions to closely monitor privileged access and provide detailed records of all privileged activity to meet these compliance standards.
• FERPA (Education): Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), educational institutions must protect student records and ensure that only authorized users have access to them. PAM supports this by enforcing access restrictions, monitoring administrative activity and providing full visibility to IT teams on how student data is handled.
• GDPR and PCI-DSS (Global Data): The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) require organizations to protect personal and financial data. With PAM, organizations can limit and monitor privileged access to customer data and demonstrate compliance through detailed logs of privileged sessions.

Prevents lateral movement

After compromising an account, cybercriminals often move laterally through a network to access sensitive data. Privileged credentials are their primary target, as they allow cybercriminals to escalate their access and compromise high-value resources. PAM helps organizations stop this lateral movement by enforcing PoLP to ensure users have access only to the systems and data they need.

By limiting privileges, PAM reduces the attack surface that cybercriminals can exploit. Features like JIT access and credential vaulting ensure that privileged access is temporary and closely controlled to avoid privilege misuse. Even if privileged credentials are stolen, PAM prevents them from being used across a network, which protects sensitive data before it can be accessed. If a PAM solution has real-time session monitoring and a zero-trust security model, it actively stops unauthorized access to critical systems. This not only prevents lateral movement but also reduces the impact of a data breach, even if credentials are compromised.

Protect your sensitive data with KeeperPAM

Protecting sensitive data requires more than traditional security measures – it demands a multilayered security strategy. PAM plays a proactive role in protecting PII, PHI and other sensitive data by enforcing PoLP, securing credentials, monitoring privileged activity and preventing lateral movement. For any organization handling sensitive data, including those in healthcare or finance, PAM is no longer optional; it’s a necessary layer of protection to reduce security risks and support compliance standards.

KeeperPAM^® offers a modern, zero-trust approach to PAM and seamlessly integrates with your existing infrastructure, including Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions, to provide complete visibility and control over privileged activity.

Request a demo of KeeperPAM today to discover how your organization can better secure its most sensitive data.