The PEDM Maturity Model

Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM, or the third evolution of PAM according to Gartner research) has been stuck in a strange limbo for years. It was born in the era of data centers, admin accounts, and people logging into Windows servers with domain-wide powers, shrugging “what’s the worst that could happen?” before clicking OK.

Then the cloud arrived, making the answer to that question painfully apparent.

The way we elevate and delegate privilege hasn’t kept pace with what identity risk looks like today. Many organizations are somewhere between “we require MFA” and “we have a workflow that everyone ignores.” Meanwhile, attackers don’t care which stage you think you’re at. If a broad, pre-approved role exists, they’ll find it, trigger it, and move through your environment like a polite but determined tourist who “just wants to have a look” at a bit of absolutely everything.

PEDM allows users to temporarily obtain limited higher-level access to perform specific tasks, adhering to the principle of least privilege.

So, here’s our practical PEDM maturity model, clear, modern, cloud-aware, designed for CISOs, security architects, and the engineers who mutter under their breath whenever PAM is mentioned. The top levels are where the interesting stuff happens, and where modern identity platforms (basically ours) now live.

Level 1: MFA Before Elevation: The Minimum Bar to Enter Civilized Society

This stage is familiar: you protect privileged elevation with MFA or step-up authentication. It’s basic hygiene. A bit like washing your hands; good practice, but it won’t save you if the kitchen is full of raw chicken.

You still rely on coarse, pre-authorized roles. The admin role sits there, waiting. And if an attacker steals a valid session or phishes a token, MFA is old news. It did its job 20 minutes ago.

Good, necessary, compliant with international cybersecurity standards, but nowhere near sufficient.

Level 2: Time-Boxed Global Admin Elevation: “Let’s Give You Too Much Access, But Only Briefly”

At this stage, maximally-elevated access expires after a set time. CISOs often feel progress here, and to be fair, shrinking the window does reduce blast radius.

But the role itself? Still the same sprawling, overpowered monster.

Time-boxing narrows opportunity, not capability. If the attacker is patient, and they usually are, they’ll wait for someone else to press the button. Token replay, session hijacking, dodgy browser extension… once they’re in, the countdown isn’t much of a deterrent.

Better, but structurally unchanged.

Level 3: Approval Workflows: The Illusion of Control Through Email

We fix this human bottleneck by moving elevation into the tools people use all day. Approvals in Slack or Teams become short, structured prompts that show the exact action being requested, the resource, the reason, and the expected duration. No buried emails. No vague “admin access” tickets. And because the platform handles group membership automatically, using least-privilege analysis to select only the minimum rights needed, the approver isn’t rubber-stamping an old, oversized role. They’re approving a single, well-defined entitlement with context, not guesswork.

This stage often feels mature because there’s a process, a workflow, and an audit trail. But we’re still elevating to the same bulky role. We’re still handing out privileges in bundles designed years ago. And we’re still relying on humans to make consistent, risk-based decisions while they’re also juggling thirty other priorities.

Organizations can often stall here. They can confuse gates with governance.

We can fix this human bottleneck by moving elevation into the places people already work. Using Slack or Teams as the approval surface turns privilege requests into clear, contextual prompts with all the details the approver actually needs. No buried emails, no rubber-stamping, no separate effort for each cloud platform. And because we automatically manage group membership for IAM groups analyzed for least privilege, the approver isn’t signing off on a decades-old role; they’re approving a single, well-defined subset of actions. It stops being “gatekeeping” and becomes regulated convenience.

Level 4: Where Elevation Becomes Precision, Not Guesswork

Modern PEDM begins when elevation stops relying on oversized, predefined roles. Instead of handing out a broad IAM group, the system generates a temporary policy with only the specific actions the user needs at that moment. In AWS, that often means a handful of tightly scoped S3 permissions—such as s3:ListBucket or a small set of 1–5 actions—applied across the relevant buckets. It’s still a major reduction from the sweeping access of traditional roles. Nothing lingers, nothing expands over time, and nothing sits waiting to be hijacked. Privilege becomes purpose-built rather than inherited.

Zero standing privileges. Nothing lingering. Nothing to hijack later.

Level 5: Identity Intelligence Shapes the Elevation Decision: Context Becomes King

Once permissions are precise, you can start shaping elevation with identity intelligence. Behavioral baselines, recent entitlement activity, device posture, session signals, authentication freshness, and anomalies all inform the decision. The system determines not only whether elevation should occur, but how much privilege is safe to grant, for how long, and under what conditions. Normal behavior results in a smooth, low-friction request. Suspicious behavior triggers tighter scopes, extra verification, or outright denial.

Level 6: Autonomous, Risk-Driven Privilege Orchestration: PEDM That Runs Itself

The final stage is where the whole model comes together.

No manual approvals. No static roles. No “who gave Albert access to production at 2 am?” moments.

The system:

• Assesses each request automatically
• Generates temporary, least-privilege entitlements
• Monitors behavior continuously
• Shrinks or revokes privilege if session risk spikes
• Cleans up access instantly when the task finishes

At this stage, elevation becomes a fully autonomous control loop. The system evaluates each request against real-time risk signals, generates a temporary least-privilege policy, and adapts privilege as conditions change. If risk spikes, privileges are automatically reduced or revoked. When the task ends, all entitlements vanish instantly. Poof! There are no static roles to approve, no manual escalation paths to babysit, and no lingering permissions to clean up later. Privilege stops being granted; it’s orchestrated.

And once you see it working, you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Last Words

CISOs know that privilege is one of the last great ungoverned frontiers of cloud security. PEDM isn’t about creating more gates or more approvals. It’s about moving away from standing privilege and towards contextual, ephemeral, adaptive access that attackers can’t blend into or exploit.

Most organizations are stuck between Levels 1 and 3. The leap to Levels 4–6 isn’t philosophical; it’s architectural. And with the right platform, you know the one, it’s entirely achievable.

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