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In cybersecurity, not all access is created equal. While every employee account represents a potential entry point, privileged accounts — those with administrative rights over servers, databases, network devices and security controls — are in a category of their own. Compromise a standard employee’s account and an attacker gains a foothold. Compromise a privileged account and they effectively own your infrastructure.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is the discipline of controlling, monitoring and auditing who can access privileged credentials, when, and for what purpose. For Indian enterprises operating under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act 2023 and CERT-In’s incident reporting framework, PAM is no longer a best-practice recommendation — it is an operational necessity.
Post-breach forensic investigations consistently identify one common thread: the attacker eventually reached a privileged account. The path varies — a phished end-user credential used for lateral movement, an unpatched vulnerability in a service running under a domain admin account, or a compromised contractor who had been granted standing administrative access — but the destination is almost always the same.
Three patterns are especially common in Indian enterprise environments:
Many organisations continue to run critical applications under shared service accounts whose passwords haven’t been rotated in months or years. These accounts are often excluded from standard password policies because changing them requires co-ordination across multiple systems. Attackers who obtain these credentials — through a memory dump, a phishing campaign, or an insider threat — can maintain persistent access long after the initial compromise is detected and the end-user account is reset.
IT administrators who require privileged access to perform their work are often given permanent, always-on administrative rights to reduce operational friction. This standing access, even when held by trusted personnel, dramatically expands the blast radius of any credential compromise — including legitimate accounts used from compromised endpoints, phishing victims who also happen to be IT admins, or former employees whose accounts were not promptly deprovisioned.
Managed service providers, hardware support vendors and cloud consultants frequently require privileged access to client environments. Without a PAM framework, this access is often granted via shared credentials sent over email, lacks time-bounding, and generates no audit trail. For Indian enterprises with complex vendor ecosystems — particularly in manufacturing, retail and financial services — this is a significant and often underestimated risk.
PAM failures have direct regulatory consequences under India’s evolving compliance framework:
A mature PAM programme is built on four foundational capabilities:
You cannot protect what you don’t know exists. Many organisations — particularly those that have grown through acquisition, or that run large on-premise server estates — have hundreds of privileged accounts that are not centrally tracked. The starting point for any PAM programme is a comprehensive inventory: local administrator accounts on servers, service accounts in Active Directory, database superuser accounts, network device management credentials, and cloud IAM roles with broad permissions.
Privileged credentials should be stored in an encrypted vault, not in spreadsheets, password managers not designed for shared enterprise use, or — most commonly — in the institutional memory of individual administrators. The vault enforces check-out workflows: an administrator requests access to a specific credential for a defined purpose and time window, the vault provides it (after appropriate approval), and the password is automatically rotated after the session ends.
Just-in-time (JIT) access takes this further: administrators have no standing privileges. When privileged access is needed, it is provisioned for the minimum required scope and duration, then automatically revoked. This dramatically reduces the window of opportunity for an attacker who compromises an administrator’s endpoint.
Every privileged session should be recorded — keystrokes, commands executed, files accessed — and those recordings should be indexed and searchable. This serves two purposes: it creates an audit trail for compliance and forensic investigation, and it acts as a deterrent against insider misuse. For high-risk sessions (production database access, firewall configuration changes), real-time monitoring with anomaly alerting allows the SOC to identify suspicious activity during a session rather than after the fact.
Not every privileged action needs to be approved in advance, but high-risk operations — bulk data exports, schema changes, firewall rule modifications, domain controller access — should require a second authorisation step. This dual-control model is standard practice in financial services and increasingly expected in other sectors. It also provides a natural checkpoint for detecting social-engineering attempts: if an attacker has compromised one administrator’s credentials and requests an unusual privileged action, the approval workflow creates an opportunity for a colleague to flag the anomaly.
For organisations running FortiGate NGFWs and Fortinet network security infrastructure — which accounts for a significant share of the Indian enterprise security market — PAM has specific relevance. FortiGate management interfaces, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer all involve highly privileged access: an administrator with access to FortiManager can modify firewall rules across the entire estate, disable security policies, or exfiltrate the full ruleset.
Best practices for FortiGate PAM include:
As Indian enterprises accelerate cloud adoption — AWS, Azure and GCP are all expanding their India region footprints — PAM needs to extend to cloud IAM roles and service accounts. Cloud environments introduce new categories of privilege that don’t map neatly onto traditional AD-based PAM:
Cloud-native PAM integrations — connecting your vault to AWS IAM, Azure AD PIM, or GCP IAM — allow you to apply the same just-in-time, session-recorded, vault-protected model to cloud privileged access that you use for on-premise infrastructure.
A PAM programme generates significant telemetry: vault access events, session recordings, JIT provisioning and revocation records, and approval workflow audit logs. The challenge for security operations teams is integrating this privileged access data with the broader security event picture — particularly when an incident is underway and the team needs to quickly determine whether a privileged account was involved.
The platform we deploy and operate for clients is PrahiX Ora, a unified SecOps platform built by PrahiX Tech Pvt Ltd, designed to consolidate security visibility across four operational domains:
SIEM: Ora’s SIEM ingests logs from PAM solutions, Active Directory, cloud IAM, firewalls and endpoints, applying MITRE ATT&CK-mapped correlation rules. For privileged access specifically, Ora can detect anomalous patterns such as a privileged account logging in from an unusual IP, a service account being used interactively, or a bulk permission change outside of a known change window — patterns that point to credential abuse even when the individual log entries look legitimate in isolation. Tiered log retention (hot/cold/archive) supports CERT-In’s 180-day in-country log retention requirement, ensuring that privileged access records are available for the full forensic investigation window.
NMS: Privileged access attacks rarely stay confined to the identity layer — once an attacker has administrative credentials, they move laterally through the network. Ora’s Network Management System provides unified observability across firewalls, switches, access points and WAN links, with ML-based anomaly detection that can identify unusual east-west traffic patterns consistent with lateral movement from a compromised privileged account. For multi-vendor network estates — common in Indian enterprises where infrastructure has grown organically — this unified NOC visibility is what prevents attackers from moving through blind spots.
Video Surveillance (VMS): Privileged access abuse sometimes has a physical component: an insider copying data to a USB device, a visitor with access to a server room, or a support technician working on equipment without supervision. Ora’s video surveillance (VMS) module provides ONVIF-compatible camera management with video analytics, enabling physical and logical security correlation under one operations view. This is particularly relevant for data centre environments, server rooms and network operations centres where physical access to infrastructure is a meaningful risk vector.
SOAR: When a PAM alert fires — suspected credential abuse, an unusual privileged session, an out-of-hours access attempt — the response timeline matters. Ora’s SOAR module includes pre-built playbooks that can automatically suspend a suspicious privileged session, revoke a compromised vault credential, push an IP block to FortiGate, and generate a draft CERT-In incident report — all within minutes of detection. For organisations subject to CERT-In’s 6-hour reporting window, this automation is what makes compliance with the timeline realistic rather than aspirational.
If your organisation is looking to integrate PAM telemetry into a unified SOC operations picture, we would welcome a conversation. Contact the PJ Networks team to discuss how Ora is deployed in practice.
PAM is not an overnight project, but the journey can be broken into manageable phases:
PJ Networks delivers managed security services to Indian enterprises across the full security stack — from FortiGate NGFW and FortiMail deployment to 24/7 NOC/SOC operations and ZTNA rollout. Privileged Access Management is a recurring theme in our risk assessments: it appears in almost every enterprise engagement as a gap that needs to be addressed.
We can help your organisation with:
To start the conversation, reach out to us at pjnetworks.com/contact. Privileged access is the attacker’s most valuable prize — controlling it is your most important defence.