Azure PIM (Privilege Identity Management) is a valuable tool, but can it truly meet the comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) requirements of modern enterprises? This article explores its capabilities and limitations.
Key Use Cases Azure PIM Does Not Fully Address:
Here are a few examples:
- Azure PIM primarily focuses on Azure AD groups and roles. It does not support non-Azure AD groups. For example Azure PIM does not support specific roles within Exchange RBAC or SharePoint RBAC. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/id-governance/privileged-identity-management/pim-roles
- Azure PIM cannot generate ephemeral tokens for JIT sessions. This capability is often required by DevOps users who need a temporary, disposable token along with their JIT entitlement for automated tasks and scripting.
- Azure PIM only allows for adding or removing an existing user ID to a group. Azure PIM cannot make the User ID ephemeral.
- Azure PIM currently lacks comprehensive management capabilities for non-human identities (like service principals or managed identities) in privileged access scenarios.
- A command-line interface (CLI) option is not a native feature of Azure PIM.
- Azure PIM’s does not work for on-prem Servers, Databases, Networking Devices, Firewalls and Kubernetes. https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/17ha400/azure_pim_with_on_premises_server/
In Summary:
While Azure PIM is excellent for managing privileged identities within a purely Azure environment, its design does not inherently extend to multi-cloud or on-premises use cases. This can present significant challenges for organizations with hybrid or multi-cloud strategies looking for a unified PAM solution as they expand beyond Azure.
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