Alright, let's cut through the vendor fog. Everyone's pushing Privileged Access Management (PAM) as a mandatory cloud security blanket. But for cloud-native environments, especially on AWS, I'm skeptical. Do we really need a whole extra layer like BeyondTrust when we have IAM roles, permission boundaries, and session tags?
I've seen teams implement a full PAM solution for AWS and end up with:
* A convoluted, two-hop process for engineers (login to PAM -> request creds -> assume role)
* Duplicate audit trails that need reconciliation
* Yet another console and set of policies to manage (because surprise, the PAM tool needs extensive IAM permissions too)
AWS IAM isn't perfect, but with proper design—using temporary credentials, scoping roles with specific policies, and leveraging AWS Organizations SCPs—you can get robust, just-in-time access. CloudTrail logs everything natively.
So, the real question: For those who've gone with BeyondTrust PAM for AWS access, what specific problem did it solve that IAM roles and native AWS tools couldn't? And be honest about the overhead it added. Was it truly about security, or more about ticking a compliance checkbox in a way auditors recognized?
I'm particularly interested in operational friction. Did your devs actually use the process, or did they find creative workarounds?