Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) often get treated as interchangeable — both deal with "access," after all. In reality, they solve different problems, and enterprises that run only one usually don't realize what they're missing until an audit or incident exposes it.
What Each One Actually Does:
- PAM secures and monitors privileged sessions in real time — vaulting credentials, recording admin activity, enforcing just-in-time elevation.
- IGA governs the broader lifecycle of all access — who should have what, why, approved by whom, and reviewed how often.
Where the Gap Shows Up:
- PAM protects a privileged session well, but doesn't answer whether that person should have had standing privileged access in the first place.
- IGA can flag that someone has admin rights, but doesn't monitor what they actually did once inside that session.
- Without both, organizations end up either governing access on paper with no runtime control, or controlling sessions tightly while ungoverned privileged accounts pile up elsewhere.
Bottom Line:
PAM and IGA aren't competing categories — they're complementary layers. IGA decides who should have privileged access and keeps that decision current; PAM controls and monitors what happens the moment that access is used. Enterprises need both working together, not one standing in for the other.
