Privilege Management for Unix vs. Centrify - which has less overhead?

I'm an SRE lead at a fintech company with just over 1000 Linux servers, split between on-prem and cloud, and we've run both solutions in anger. We've had BeyondTrust PMUN in production for three years, and prior to that, we were a Centrify DirectAuthorize shop for about four.

- **Login/auth latency**: Centrify's AD dependency is the dominant variable. With a healthy site-local DC and a warm Kerberos ticket cache, user logins were sub-200ms. When the cache was cold or network latency spiked, we saw 2-4 second delays as the agent performed directory lookups and group enumeration. PMUN, using its local policy database updated via pull, is consistently under 50ms for policy decision, full stop. The trade-off is policy propagation latency, which for us is a 5-minute cron job.
- **Automated process overhead**: This is where Centrify hurt us. CI/CD jobs performing sequential privilege escalations (think Ansible runs) incurred the full directory lookup cost each time, as the service account's Kerberos cache wasn't always shared between processes. We observed a 15-20% increase in pipeline duration. PMUN, being locally evaluated, added a negligible 1-3ms per `sudo` call, which our performance tests considered noise.
- **Logging noise and volume**: Centrify was a firehose, generating separate log events for directory connection, policy evaluation, and command execution. In a busy environment, this meant 5-8 lines per `sudo` invocation, ballooning our SIEM ingestion costs. PMUN logs a single structured entry (command, policy decision, timestamp) per evaluation. We went from ~120GB/day of PAM logs with Centrify to ~18GB/day with PMUN, for the same server count.
- **The hidden integration tax**: Centrify's "strength" of deep AD integration meant we had to ensure our AD schema extensions were correct, site topology was optimal, and that we had redundancy for the Centrify-specific zones. This was a full-time job for a junior sysadmin. PMUN's "dumb" model of using a local user store and SSH keys, with policies deployed via an RPM, took two days to integrate into our existing Ansible/Puppet pipeline.

My pick is BeyondTrust PMUN, specifically for environments where predictable low-latency privilege elevation is non-negotiable and your team doesn't want to become Windows AD experts. If your org lives and dies by Group Policy for everything and you have a dedicated Windows team to manage the Centrify infrastructure, that changes the calculus. Tell us your team's Windows AD skill level and your acceptable latency budget for a CI/CD `sudo` call, and the choice becomes binary.

You're fixating on the wrong metric. Latency's a red herring - it's the contract renewal where the real overhead hits.

> current homegrown privilege escalation scripts are becoming a compliance nightmare

So you're swapping one technical debt for another, just a vendor-shaped one. Both solutions will happily sell you "lightweight agents" that metastasize into mandatory management consoles, support contracts, and per-CPU licensing traps within 18 months.

The logging overhead question is backwards. The problem isn't data volume, it's whether the audit logs are in a proprietary format you can't query without their tools. Centrify's are notoriously obfuscated. PMUN's are cleaner but good luck extracting them without their reporting module, which is a separate line item.

Have you actually mapped the total cost of either solution over a 5-year horizon, including the FTE time to manage their quirks? That's the overhead that matters.