There’s an unspoken gap in the Privileged Access Management (PAM) industry. Most enterprise PAM solutions do not meet the needs of most ‘non-enterprise’ organizations, particularly regarding the types of issues they must address.

I’ve seen this play out repeatedly. After completing endpoint security deployments across 4,000 organizations and nearly 2 million devices, the problem is clearly visible. Enterprise PAM solution providers offer a complete suite of features, including full-featured vaults, session recording, and behavior-based analytics. At the same time, the IT department at a small manufacturing firm simply wants its bookkeeper to update QuickBooks without having to call the Help Desk three times a week. These are two distinct problems, yet the PAM industry has treated them as the same issue.

The mismatch stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what privileged access actually looks like in most organizations. It’s not nation-state actors exploiting session hijacking. It’s decades of poor application design that baked admin requirements into applications that will never be updated. Some of these apps were built in the early 2000s. They require local admin rights because no one thought twice about it at the time. Now they’re stuck in production, running on thousands of endpoints, with no upgrade path in sight.

Why the Standard Playbook Breaks Down

Enterprise PAM was designed for organizations with large, dedicated security teams, six-month implementation budgets, and staff responsible for managing these tools. The standard playbook doesn’t work for school districts, regional manufacturers, and municipal governments. These organizations can’t deploy the tools without outside help, and implementation takes months. Once they’re in place, keeping them running requires expertise these organizations don’t have on staff.

I’ve seen companies spend serious money on PAM deployments only to gut them six months later because they realized they had essentially hired a permanent professional services engagement just to maintain the thing.

A single IT person at a mid-sized company or school district may be managing 200 or 300 endpoints; they are not running a security operations center. They are trying to keep printers working and get the finance team back online after a software update breaks something.

When one of their users needs elevated access to install software or run an app that demands admin rights, the current options are not great.

Either give them a full admin account, which undermines your security posture, or walk them through an enterprise PAM workflow, which adds 45 minutes to what should be a five-minute fix.

The choice is convenience or security. That’s where we are.

A Better Fit Already Exists

The type of solution most organizations require is Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM), a subset of the broader Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions space.

There are many reasons why organizations should understand the differences in these types of solutions. Full PAM solutions are based on the premise that when users require privileged access to systems or applications, organizations should vault the user’s credentials, capture sessions, and monitor all activity associated with each privileged user’s actions. This approach to privileged access management is ideal for organizations facing more complex threats from sophisticated attackers using common admin shared account credentials. Most mid-market organizations, however, face much less sophisticated threats. In mid-market organizations, the main threats come from users needing to use legacy applications that require admin rights, and their respective IT teams needing to provide access while minimizing the risk of creating a security gap.

PEDM solves this specific problem. It grants temporary, granular privileges at the application or process level, not blanket admin access to an entire system. A user gets what they need, for as long as they need it, and then access is automatically removed. No vault checkout workflow. No session recording overhead. No dedicated team required to keep it running.

For an IT generalist responsible for managing hundreds of endpoints, the difference between implementing a new solution that will take months to implement and configuring a solution that can be managed by a small team is a key factor in whether or not the new solution will be adopted or simply added to the list of abandoned security initiatives.

What the Industry Should Do

The PAM market needs to stop treating every privileged access problem as the same. An investment bank and a county school district have almost nothing in common when it comes to privileged access needs: different threat models, different resources, different tolerance for complexity.

Vendors who figure out how to serve that second group without watering down the first will find an enormous market waiting. There are tens of thousands of organizations running legacy software that demands admin rights, with IT teams too small to manage an enterprise security platform. They need solutions built around their actual constraints, not the constraints of a Fortune 500 security operations team.

The technology already exists. What’s missing is an industry willing to take these organizations seriously.