The privileged access management (PAM) market has long been dominated by solutions focused on securing IT infrastructure—protecting administrative access to servers, databases, and network devices. But as organizations increasingly rely on cloud-based business applications for their most critical operations, a new category is emerging that addresses a fundamentally different challenge: Business Privileged Access Management (B-PAM).

The Gap Traditional PAM Leaves Behind

Traditional IT-oriented PAM solutions excel at securing system administrators, database administrators, and other technical roles. They monitor who logs into servers, track administrative sessions, and protect credential vaults. However, they fall short when it comes to urgent or emergency access that actually drive business operations—the high-risk transactions occurring within enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Ariba.

Consider urgent access to a finance manager role enabled to approve million-dollar purchase orders in Ariba, or HR director access that can modify executive compensation in Workday. These users may never touch a server or database directly, but their application privileges carry enormous business risk and regulatory scrutiny. Traditional PAM solutions simply weren’t designed to address this layer of access governance.

What Makes Business PAM Different

Business PAM represents a fundamental shift in how we think about privileged access. Rather than focusing on system-level administrative rights, B-PAM governs urgent/elevated access to functional privileges within business applications, the ability to approve transactions, modify critical data, or execute sensitive business processes.

The key differentiators include:

Process-Centric Approach: B-PAM sessions monitor what users actually do within applications, not just whether they can log in. It tracks approvals, data modifications, and business transactions in real-time.

Compliance-First Design: While IT PAM focuses on security, B-PAM prioritizes regulatory compliance, audit trails, and segregation of duties controls that auditors demand.

Application-Native Integration: B-PAM solutions integrate directly with application databases and transaction logs, providing granular visibility into business activities rather than generic system access.

The Video Monitoring Problem

Some organizations attempt to address business privileged access through traditional PAM’s video session monitoring capabilities. However, this approach quickly breaks down in business scenarios:

• Scale Issues: Recording every business user session creates massive storage requirements and review overhead
• Privacy Concerns: Video monitoring business activities raises privacy and data protection issues
• Audit Inefficiency: Reviewing hours of video recordings to verify compliance is impractical for regular audits
• False Security: Video shows what happened but doesn’t prevent violations or provide real-time alerts

Business activities require a more sophisticated, data-driven approach that can automatically detect policy violations and provide structured audit evidence necessary for compliance approvals

The Technical Challenge: Extracting Business Intelligence

Implementing effective B-PAM isn’t simply a matter of applying traditional PAM techniques to business applications. Business applications present unique technical challenges:

Complex User Interfaces: Modern enterprise applications feature sophisticated interfaces with multiple layers of navigation, making it difficult to track the actual business significance of user actions.

Diverse Data Processing: Each application has its own data models, transaction flows, and logging mechanisms, requiring specialized integration approaches.

Administrative Access Complexity: Take SAP Ariba as an example—when administrators require elevated access for system maintenance, it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish between legitimate administrative activities and actual business transactions like purchase approvals. The same elevated session might include both system configuration changes and multi-million-dollar procurement decisions, but traditional monitoring can’t differentiate between them.

Application-Specific Logic: Understanding whether a user action represents a policy violation requires deep knowledge of each application’s business rules and workflows.

The Pathlock Advantage: Data-Driven B-PAM

This is where Pathlock’s approach becomes revolutionary. Rather than relying on generic session monitoring, Pathlock integrates directly with cloud application databases and transaction logs to provide comprehensive, data-driven Business PAM:

Native Application Integration: Pathlock connects directly to the underlying data structures of business applications, extracting detailed transaction logs and user activity data that reveal the true business impact of each action.

Fine Grained Transaction Analysis: Instead of recording video sessions, the platform captures the actual business transactional and log data as they occur, facilitating reviews that compare intended actions with actual updates for purposes evaluating potential policy violations and compliance risks.

Automated Compliance Reporting: By accessing structured transaction data rather than video recordings, Pathlock can automatically generate audit reports that clearly document PAM processes and review status.

Looking Forward: The B-PAM Imperative

As regulatory requirements intensify and business applications become more critical to organizational operations, the need for Business Privileged Access Management will only grow. Organizations can no longer afford to treat business application access as an afterthought to infrastructure security.

The companies that recognize this shift early, and implement comprehensive B-PAM strategies, will be better positioned to demonstrate compliance, reduce business risk, and maintain competitive advantage in an increasingly regulated business environment.

Traditional PAM secured our servers and databases. Business PAM secures our actual business operations. The question isn’t whether your organization needs both, it’s whether you can afford to delay implementing B-PAM any longer.

Ready to explore how Business Privileged Access Management can transform your compliance posture? Learn more about Pathlock’s data-driven approach to reducing risk and ensuring regulatory compliance.