Growing Dynamism Due to Modern Infra of Cloud and SaaS and Agile Workforce
Legacy PAM covered your datacenter. But your infrastructure isn’t static anymore. Cloud infrastructure, ephemeral resources, SaaS applications, and databases all introduce fast-moving access patterns that legacy tools can’t handle. You don’t need “another PAM”-you need a modern PAM that fits how modern infra operates.
The Status Quo: Scripts, Terraform, and Automation Overhead
DevOps and platform teams often extend existing PAM through homegrown tools:
- Custom workflows in Terraform
- Scripting JIT access logic in CI/CD
- Leveraging general automation platforms like Airflow or Jenkins
It starts flexible but quickly becomes brittle, opaque, and hard to scale.
🔍 Reality Check: “Most teams realize they’re not building a PAM, they’re duct-taping IAM, audit, policy, and compliance into something that kind of looks like one.”
Modern Infrastructure is Different
Modern infrastructure spans cloud platforms, SaaS applications, containerized workloads, and databases, all of which are dynamic and decentralized. Managing access across this evolving stack requires a fundamentally new approach.
- Dynamic Resources: Containers, ephemeral VMs, cloud-native services, SaaS apps, and databases change daily. Static access controls can’t keep up with the velocity and granularity required. Databases especially demand scoped access, down to specific tables, query actions, and durations.
- Cross-Environment Complexity: Each environment, AWS, GCP, Azure, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Kubernetes, has its own permission model, APIs, and access quirks.
- Audit-Readiness: Ad hoc tools break under SOC2, ISO, HIPAA reviews.
- Non-Human Access: CI pipelines, ser vice accounts, bots.
- Infrastructure Dynamism: AWS alone offers over 200 services with APIs that continually evolve. Managing access to these in real time is a moving target.
The Hidden Cost of Building Your Own Cloud PAM
- Engineering Drag: Teams must design, build, and maintain an internal access system, diverting engineering talent away from core product development. Every edge case, system integration, and approval logic becomes custom code to write, test, and support.
- Compliance Overhead: Internal systems must meet audit requirements for SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, etc. That means logging every access decision, maintaining review workflows, proving least privilege, and surviving audits with documentation that often isn’t built into DIY systems.
- Security Risk: Scripts can’t enforce real-time revocation, MFA, or context-aware access. Homegrown logic typically lacks depth in enforcement, alerting, and remediation.
- Lack of Visibility: Who had access to what? When? Why? Most homegrown systems can’t answer that clearly, leading to gaps in audit readiness and investigation workflows.
- Compliance Debt: UARs, access logs, and approval chains require constant upkeep and often get deprioritized, leading to issues when auditors come calling.
- Employee Knowledge Risk: DIY systems often rely on tribal knowledge. If a key engineer who built or operates it leaves the company, context disappears, creating operational risk and delaying incident response or updates.
Why Buy Cloud PAM Now (Even If You Have a Legacy PAM)
- Purpose-Built for Cloud: Fine-grained JIT access across cloud platforms, SaaS apps, containerized environments, and databases.
- Integrated Workflows: Slack, Jira, SNOW, not just portals or ticket queues.
- Runtime Decisions: Enforce access policies with context (on-call status, device trust, geo).
- Audit-Grade Logs: Every request, approval, and session is tracked automatically.
- Rapid Time-to-Value: Deployed in days, not quarters, no agents, no lift.
- Regulatory Drivers: New regulations like DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) now explicitly require capabilities like Just-in-Time access, audit logs, and privileged access control for financial entities.
🧐 Insight: “One customer used Jenkins scripts to orchestrate JIT access, but ran into major compliance gaps, frequent system failures, and limited scalability. Another built an internal tool that took a team to launch and required a full-time engineer just to maintain, only to encounter unforeseen bugs that broke access workflows in production.”
What You Gain by Buying a Modern PAM
| Challenge | Scripted Tooling | Axiom Cloud PAM |
| JIT Access | Basic, time-boxed | Granular, contextual, real-time |
| Approvals | Manual or CI/CD hacks | Slack/Teams/Jira-integrated, policy-based |
| Visibility | Fragmented logs | Full lifecycle audit trail |
| Compliance | Manual UARs | Automated reviews + exports |
| Maintenance | Ongoing engineering load | Zero overhead, SaaS-managed |
🚀 Book a Live Demo
See how Axiom delivers real-time, granular, audit-ready access control for cloud and SaaS infrastructure. We’ll walk through your use case and show how quickly you can go from scripts to secure.
