Let’s cut through the vendor’s best-practice slides and the compliance checkbox mentality for a moment. The standard answer you’ll get from any privileged access management sales engineer is a resounding “yes, every admin must have a distinct, identifiable account.” They’ll cite auditing, non-repudiation, and the principle of least privilege. On paper, it’s unimpeachable. In practice, I’ve watched organizations bleed money and operational sanity trying to enforce this in environments that weren’t built for it from the ground up.
The real question isn’t about the ideal; it’s about the implementation cost and the hidden trade-offs. When you mandate individual accounts for every admin, you are committing to a massive overhead in account lifecycle management. Each onboarding, role change, and offboarding event now requires precise coordination between HR, the IAM system, and CyberArk. If your organization uses a dozen different platforms with proprietary admin roles, you’re now replicating that complexity within your PAM vault. The total cost of ownership balloons not from the license, but from the hundreds of hours of administrative labor to keep this pristine model functioning. What happens when a critical system outage occurs at 2 AM and the designated individual account holder is on vacation? The pressure to share credentials or create a break-glass shared account becomes immense, and you’ve just created a shadow exception that undermines the entire policy.
Then consider the migration pitfall. Many legacy systems and embedded devices were designed with a single, shared ‘admin’ account in mind. Forcing individual accounts onto these systems sometimes requires custom integration work, third-party middleware, or simply isn’t supported. You end up with a two-tiered system: modern platforms with individual accountability, and a forgotten swamp of legacy gear still using shared secrets, making your security posture arguably more brittle and complex than when you started. The vendor will, of course, suggest you replace or upgrade all non-compliant systems, a capital expenditure that never appears in the initial ROI calculation.
I’m not advocating for shared accounts. I’m advocating for a clear-eyed assessment of whether your organization has the process maturity, the integration depth, and the budget to sustain the individual account model without creating dangerous workarounds. Often, the rush to implement “proper” PAM leads to a checkbox compliance exercise where accounts are individual in name only, because the actual usage patterns and emergency procedures haven’t been redesigned to support it. Start by auditing your actual administrative workflows, especially during incidents, before you let a vendor dictate an architecture that could triple your operational burden.
Just my two cents
Skeptic by default