Marc BeausejourPrivileged Access Management (PAM) is one of the highest-impact security moves an organization can make, and one of the easiest to delay.
In Devolutions’ 2024–2025 survey of SMB IT and security professionals, 52% reported still managing privileged access manually using spreadsheets or shared vaults. That’s up from 45% in 2023, despite growing awareness of access-related risk.
Why are so many teams still hesitant to adopt PAM? Here are the most common barriers, and practical ways to overcome them.
“PAM is too expensive (and hard to justify).”
Budget scrutiny is real in SMBs where every tool competes with urgent operational needs. In the survey, cost concerns are the #1 reason SMBs don’t adopt PAM — and the same pressure is what keeps many teams on manual workflows.
But cost isn’t the whole story:
It’s not just price, it’s proof. In many orgs, leadership is already pushing for PAM — the real question becomes: what changes on day one? They want clear evidence that PAM improves the security posture over existing methods, not just another tool to manage.
Show the value (without a spreadsheet battle):
- Start with the “risk footprint” story, not features. Manual privileged access leads to lost visibility, delayed deprovisioning, and untraceable use of privileged credentials. Exactly the failure modes that turn small incidents into large ones.
- Define ROI as reduced time and reduced exposure, not “security maturity.” Even small wins (faster offboarding, fewer shared admin passwords, clearer audit trails) have immediate operational value.
- Pilot narrowly (e.g., domain admin and a handful of critical systems) and expand after you can demonstrate reduced friction and clearer auditing.
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“We don’t need PAM. We’re too small and we already have a vault.”
Cost matters — but perception matters too. The survey suggests many organizations without PAM are held back by leadership assuming a vault or basic policies are sufficient, which is how PAM becomes a checkbox rather than a real system of control.
Why the risk feels manageable:
SMBs often equate PAM with “enterprise overhead.” If nothing bad has happened lately, privileged access feels like a manageable risk.
The winning formula:
- Reframe PAM as operational safety, not governance theater. The risk isn’t theoretical: manual processes create gaps in accountability and offboarding that accumulate over time.
- Connect PAM to moments leaders care about: compliance audits, cyber insurance questionnaires, vendor access, M&A, and employee turnover. The report explicitly calls out “low perceived need outside compliance events” as a recurring barrier — meaning urgency often arrives late.
- Simplify operational concepts: show that a vault stores secrets and PAM controls how privileged access is granted, used, rotated, and audited.
“We don’t have the time to deploy this.”
Resource constraints show up directly: shortages of staff and hours are commonly cited reasons SMBs don’t adopt PAM. In the role breakdown, IT employees report the heaviest friction: limited assets, integration issues, and tool complexities are “everyday realities.”
The all-at-once trap:
Many PAM rollouts fail because teams try to “boil the ocean”: onboard everything, integrate everything, enforce everything — all at once.
The champion’s playbook:
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Start now with these simple steps:
- Inventory privileged accounts and where they live
- Centralize & control a small set of high-risk credentials
- Automate rotation and session accountability where it matters most
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Pick “one workflow” to fix first. Common first wins: vendor access, break-glass accounts, domain admin rotation, or privileged access to production systems.
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Make reduction of manual work the KPI. If PAM doesn’t reduce toil (fewer password resets, cleaner offboarding, less “who has access?” chasing), adoption will stall.
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“It’s too complex, and integration with legacy systems will be painful.”
The report calls out integration with legacy infrastructure and complexity as familiar barriers that keep organizations on manual PAM. It also highlights sector-specific “legacy friction and integration hesitancy” (e.g., finance) as a reason manual PAM persists even where risk is high.
The fear of disruption:
Teams worry PAM will disrupt workflows, break access, or introduce “yet another system” that slows down IT.
Crossing the chasm:
- Separate “integration” from “control.” You can get value quickly by controlling and auditing privileged credentials before deep integrations are perfect.
- Prioritize compatibility by risk, not by system age. Start with the systems that create the biggest exposure (identity, virtualization, backups, firewalls, cloud admin).
- Set expectations: “We’re not modernizing everything. We’re reducing privileged risk step by step.”
“We’ll adopt it later. Right now, manual is ‘good enough.’”
This is the quietest objection, and the most common. The report’s central point is that manual PAM is a known problem that persists anyway, and the longer it’s deferred, the more deeply risk gets embedded into operations.
There’s also a strategic issue: manual processes delay revocation when people change roles or leave, and they obscure visibility into who has access to what.
Make it tangible, now:
- Replace “later” with a trigger: employee offboarding, vendor onboarding, audit prep, cyber insurance renewal, or new system rollout.
- Make the first milestone small but real: “By end of month, no shared admin passwords; by end of quarter, rotation + audit trail for top 10 privileged accounts.”
Don’t wait for an incident: Start using PAM today.
Manual PAM doesn’t stay “good enough.” It quietly gets worse.
More systems. More admins. More vendors. More exceptions. And more places where privileged access becomes invisible until it matters most.
The barriers to PAM adoption are real, but they’re not roadblocks. They’re reasons to start now, with a two-week pilot and one high-risk workflow. Control expands fast once you’ve proven the first win.
Teams succeed with PAM not by doing everything at once, but by starting small, proving value quickly, and expanding where privileged risk is highest.
Ready to start with PAM? Book a demo today or try it out in our lab!
Adam Listek
Coralie Lemasson