Privileged Identity Management (PIM) - Simply Explained

What if one of your admin accounts got stolen right now? Not a normal user account, but one of the ones with the keys to everything? Your email system, your file storage, your user database? How much damage could someone do before you even noticed? Here's the uncomfortable answer. If that admin has permanent access and most do, the attacker doesn't need to break in again. They're already inside, and they can read every email, change every password, and delete every user. And they can do it at 3am on a Saturday when nobody's watching. Most people think the risk is weak passwords, and yes, that's part of it. But the bigger problem is something most organizations never think about. It's not that people have admin rights, it's that they have them all the time, even when they're not using them. That's like leaving your front door wide open because you might need to grab something from the car later. By the end of this episode, you'll understand what privilege identity management is, and why it fixes this. It's like giving someone a hotel key card that works for exactly the time they need it, and then self-destructs that checkout. No permanent access, no open doors. So first, let's talk about why standing privileges are such a problem. The standing privilege problem, standing privileges. And that's the technical term for permissions that are always active even when you don't need them, and they're everywhere. Think about it like an office building. You have a security guard at the front door and maybe a badge system, but inside every door is unlocked all night. The server room, the filing cabinets with employee records, the executive offices, all unlocked just because one person might need to come in after hours, that standing privileges in the physical world. It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but that's exactly how most organizations handle admin access. The problem is the attack surface. If an admin account gets compromised through phishing, credential stuffing, or a stolen laptop, the attacker already has the keys to everything. They don't need to escalate privileges because the privileges are already there, and they don't need to find a second vulnerability because the first one gave them everything. And here's the part that surprises most people. A typical admin has 168 hours of access per week. That's 24/7, but they actually use those admin rights for maybe 30 minutes. 30 minutes out of 168 hours. That means their elevated access sits there unused and unprotected for 167.5 hours every single week. That's a massive window for an attacker. Real-world scenarios make this even scarier. A phishing email gets through, someone clicks the link, and their credentials get stolen. The attacker logs in at 2am with full admin access and zero additional steps needed. Or a laptop gets left in a coffee shop and the thief now has a device that can access your entire tenant. Or someone uses the same password on multiple sites, one gets breached, and their admin credentials end up floating around on the dark web. The bottom line is this. The problem isn't that people have admin rights. The problem is that they have them all the time. Standing privileges turn every compromised account into a potential disaster. And the worst part? Most organizations don't even know how many permanent admins they have. So what if there was a way to give people the access they need only when they need it? What is PIM? That's exactly what privileged identity management does. PIM for short, it's a service inside Microsoft Entra that changes how roles get assigned, not what roles exist, those stay the same. It controls how and when someone actually gets to use them. Here's the simplest definition. Instead of giving someone an admin role permanently, you make them eligible to claim it. They don't have the power until they ask for it. When they ask, they have to prove they really need it, then they get it for a limited time. And when that time is up, the power disappears. Think of it like a hotel key card. When you check into a hotel, you get a key that works for your room during your stay, not permanent access to every room forever. If you try to use it after checkout, the door stays locked. PIM works the same way. You don't get permanent access to the penthouse suite, you get a key that works for a few hours, then self-destructs. Now let's clear up a few myths. PIM is not a new set of roles. It doesn't create new admin capabilities. It doesn't replace passwords or MFA. And it's not just for IT pros, any organization with Microsoft Entra can use it. What it does is add a layer of control on top of the roles you already have. The core concept is called just-in-time access, or GIT. Think of it as a time-limited ticket instead of a permanent badge. You show up, request the ticket, use it, and it expires. No lingering permissions. No forgotten admin accounts that someone used five years ago and never cleaned up. There are two types of assignments in PIM, eligible and active. Eligible means you have the right to request the role. Active means you already have it. That's the old way, standing access. The whole point of PIM is to move people from active to eligible. You can still do your job. You just have to ask first. So how do these two types of assignments play out in practice? Let's break it down. Eligible versus active assignments. So what's the difference between eligible and active? Let's make it concrete. Eligible means you have the right to get a role, but you don't have it yet. Think of it like a membership card that lets you unlock a door, but only when you swipe it in the system checks you're allowed. Without swiping, it doesn't do anything on its own. You have the card in your pocket, but it stays locked. Active means you already have the role. That's the old way, standing access. You walk through any door anytime, because your badge never expires. That's convenient, sure, but it's also what makes compromised accounts so dangerous. In plain terms, eligible means you can. Active means you do. That distinction is everything. Here's a real-world example. Imagine a help desk technician named Sarah. She needs global admin access occasionally to fix a directory sync issue, maybe once a month for about 30 minutes. Without PM, you'd give her global admin permanently. Now she has that power 24/7, even when she's sleeping, even when she's on vacation. If her account gets fished, the attacker has full control of your tenant. With PM, you make Sarah eligible for global admin. She doesn't have the role day to day. When the sync issue happens, she activates the role for 30 minutes, fixes the problem, and it expires. The attacker who steals her credentials later finds nothing. No standing privileges, no open doors. This is the key security benefit. Eligible doesn't give an attacker anything. They'd need to activate the role too, which requires MFA justification and approval. Each step is another hurdle. Most attackers will move on to an easier target. Now a quick note on permanent eligibility. You can make someone permanently eligible for a role, meaning they can activate it any time without an expiration on their eligibility itself. But best practice says avoid this. Time-bound eligibility instead. Make someone eligible for a year or six months or whatever makes sense for your organization. That forces a review. Do they still need this? If yes, renew it. If no, remove it. Otherwise, eligibility accumulates over time and you end up with the same problem you started with. Too many people who can claim too much power. So once someone is eligible, how do they actually activate the role? That's where the real security gates come in. Activation workflow. The activation process is where PM really earns its keep. Let's walk through it from the user's perspective. So imagine someone named Sarah needs to fix a directory sync issue. She opens the PM portal inside the Azure portal or the Entra Admin Center, finds the role she's eligible for, in this case, Global Admin, and clicks Activate. First she picks how long she needs the role. The default might be eight hours, but she knows this fix takes 30 minutes. So she sets it to one hour. Smart because short-tours is always better. The admin can set a maximum duration for each role from 30 minutes up to 24 hours. Sarah's one hour request fits within that policy. Next she has to provide justification. A real reason, not just "I need admin". She types fixing directory sync issue, ticket48291. That isn't bureaucracy, it creates an audit trail. Later if someone asks why Sarah had Global Admin access at 2pm on Tuesday, there's a record with that reason. If MFA is required and it should be, Sarah gets challenged even though she already signed into the portal. Pim requires fresh proof. She opens her Authenticator app, approves the prompt, and moves forward. This is critical. If Sarah's password was stolen, but the attacker doesn't have her phone, they can't activate the role. MFA at activation is the difference between a compromised account and a contained incident. If approval is required, the request goes to a designated approver. Maybe Sarah's manager, maybe a security team member, they get a notification, review the justification and approve or deny. Some organizations require multiple approvers for the most sensitive roles. The idea is simple. No single person should be able to grant themselves unlimited power without someone else signing off. She has approved the role activates. Sarah now has Global Admin access for one hour. She opens the Enter Admin Center, navigates to the sync settings, fixes the issue, closes the portal and goes back to her normal work. Here's the thing. She doesn't need to remember to turn it off. PIM handles expiry automatically. When the hour is up, the role deactivates. And Sarah's access drops back to whatever her normal user permissions are. There are no lingering privileges or forgotten admin sessions. She can also manually deactivate early if she finishes faster than expected. So Sarah had exactly the access she needed for exactly as long as she needed it with full auditability. And if someone had stolen her credentials during that hour, they'd have had a very narrow window to do damage and every action would be logged. That's the core workflow for Entra roles. But PIM can do more than that. It also works for groups and Azure resources. PIM for groups. PIM isn't just for individual admin roles. It also manages group membership. And that's where it gets really practical. There are two types of groups you can manage with PIM. Microsoft 365 groups, the kind you use for teams. Red mailboxes and collaboration and security groups. The kind you use to grant access to apps, resources or permissions. PIM works with assigned groups, not dynamic ones. Dynamic groups are based on rules, so membership changes automatically. But PIM needs groups where you explicitly add and remove people. So how does it work? You can make someone an eligible owner or member of a group. They don't have the membership until they activate it. When they do, they get all the permissions that come with being in that group and when the activation expires, they're removed. Here's a real example. Say you have a project team working on a sensitive document library that's only accessible to members of a specific security group. Normally, nobody in the company is a member of that group. When someone on the project needs access, they activate their membership in PIM, get access for a few hours, do their work and the membership expires. After that, the document library is locked again. The activation process for groups works exactly the same as it does for roles. MFA if required, justification, approval if needed, time limit, everything is locked. The same security gates apply. Why does this matter? Because groups control a lot more than you might think. Group membership can grant access to applications, assign licenses or grant permissions to share point sites, teams, channels or Azure resources. By making group membership eligible instead of permanent, you control all of those things through a single PIM policy. One important thing to know, you have to onboard groups to PIM first. They don't appear automatically. You go into the PIM portal, discover the groups in your tenant and select the ones you want to manage. Once a group is onboarded, you can't take it out of PIM. So think carefully about which groups need this level of control. For most organizations, the best candidates are groups that grant access to sensitive data or critical applications. Start there, you can always add more later. And then there's Azure resources, the actual infrastructure like virtual machines and databases. PIM for Azure resources. PIM also works for Azure R-Back roles. That's the permission system that controls who can do what inside your Azure subscriptions, resource groups and individual resources. The model is the same. Azure then becomes eligible for owner on a subscription, but they only activated for an hour when they need to make a change. They request the role, justify their need, pass MFA if required and get approval if needed. Then the role activates. When the time's up, it deactivates automatically, no standing access. Why does this matter separately from intrar roles? Because Azure resource roles control your actual infrastructure, the virtual machines, the databases, the storage accounts, the networking. These are the things that keep your business running. If someone has permanent owner access on a production subscription, they can delete everything. And if that account gets compromised, the attacker can too. Here's a typical example. A developer needs contributor access to deploy a fix to a production environment. Without PM, you'd give them permanent contributor and now they have that power every day, even when they're not deploying. With PIM, they're eligible. They activate when the deployment window opens, do their work, and the role expires. The rest of the time, they have no special access to production. The contrast with permanent RBAC assignments is stark. Most Azure environments have way too many permanent owners. People accumulate permissions over years and never give them back. PM forces a clean break. If you don't need it right now, you don't have it. All of this creates a much safer environment, but what does that actually look like in terms of real world benefits? Security benefits in audit. The biggest benefit is simple. Reducing the attack surface. If an account gets compromised but has no active roles, the attacker gets nothing. They're logged in as a standard user with no special powers. They can't delete resources, can't read sensitive data, can't change configurations, the compromises contained. But even if the attacker tries to activate a role, they hit multiple gates. MFA stops anyone who doesn't have the user's phone. Justification requires them to explain what they're doing. Approval means someone else has to sign off. Each gate makes it harder for them. Most attackers will give up and look for an easier target. Then there's the audit trail. Every activation is logged. Who activated which role? When? For how long? With what justification? Who approved it? It's a complete history of every privileged action. Auditors love this. You can prove that privileged access was temporary, justified and approved. No more guessing who had admin rights six months ago. PIM also supports access reviews. These are schedule checks where managers review who still needs eligibility for certain roles. If someone hasn't activated a role in six months, maybe they don't need it anymore. The review can automatically remove outdated assignments. This prevents privileged creep. The slow accumulation of permissions that happens when nobody ever cleans up. And there's a direct security score benefit. Using PIM improves your identity secure score in Microsoft Entra. Microsoft tracks how well you're protecting your environment and PM usage is a major factor. The more roles you move from permanent to eligible, the higher your score. But here is an honest note. PIM alone isn't a silver bullet. It needs to be part of a broader security strategy. You still need secure admin workstations. You still need conditional access policies. You still need good password hygiene. PIM handles one specific problem. Standing privileges. And it does that very well. But it doesn't replace every other security control. That said, if you do nothing else, moving your global admin accounts from permanent to eligible is one of the highest impact changes you can make. It cuts your attack surface from 168 hours a week down to whatever small window you choose. That's hard to beat. Common pitfalls and best practices. PIM is powerful, but it's not foolproof. People make mistakes. Let's cover the most common ones so you don't repeat them. First up, treating PIM like a fire and forget missile. You can't just set it up once and walk away. You have to check in regularly. Are the right roles covered? Are your activation time still reasonable? Are the approvals still the right people? PIM needs ongoing attention. Treat it like a plant, not a rock. Second, leaving too many permanent active assignments. This defeats the whole point. If you make one global admin eligible, but leave three others permanently active, you haven't shrunk your attack surface much. You want to eliminate standing privileges. Not just move a few accounts around. Be ruthless. If someone doesn't need permanent access, make them eligible. That's the whole idea. Third, setting activation durations way too long. A 24 hour activation window is basically permanent access. The point is time bound access. Keep durations as short as practical. One hour for most tasks. Four hours for bigger maintenance windows. Anything longer needs serious justification. Fourth, not requiring MFA on activation. This is the single most important security gate. If you allow role activation without MFA, a stolen password is all in attack and needs. MFA at activation is non-negotiable for any sensitive role. Think of it as the reception desk checking your ID before you enter the building. Fifth, over relying on eligible assignments without proper approval workflows. Being eligible is better than being permanently active, but it's not enough on its own. If anyone can activate any role any time without oversight, you've just added a click to the process without adding real security. Combine eligibility with approval for the most sensitive roles. Sixth, ignoring break class accounts. You need emergency accounts that bypass PIM entirely. If something goes wrong and approvers unavailable, a policy breaks, someone gets locked out, you need a way in. Create one or two break class accounts with standing global admin access. Lock them down with long, complex passwords. Store them securely, monitor them heavily. They should never be used in normal operations. Best practice overall starts small. Pick one high-risk role. Global admin is the obvious choice and make it eligible only. Test the workflow, train your admins, then expand to other roles gradually. Monitor the alerts in PIM. It will tell you if you have too many global admins, if roles aren't being activated, if something looks off, pay attention to those signals, and combine PIM with conditional access, require stronger authentication methods for role activation, force activation to come from compliant devices. Add location restrictions, the more layers you add, the harder you make it for an attacker. So here's where we land. Permanent admin access is a huge risk. It's the unlocked door that stays open all night. PIM replaces that with temporary just-in-time access. A key that works for a few hours then stops working. A single most important action you can take today, go into your Entra admin center, open PIM. Find your global admin accounts, make at least one of them eligible instead of permanently active. That one change reduces your attack surface from 168 hours a week to whatever small window you choose. Do you know how many permanent admins you have right now? Most people don't, and that's exactly the problem. If this episode helped, subscribe for more plain English explanations of Microsoft Security. And click the next video to learn about access reviews. How to audit who still needs their permissions? knowing who has power is the first step to controlling it.