New market forecasts putting the privileged access management sector on track to reach $22.93 billion by 2035 offer a useful signal for security leaders building long-term identity infrastructure budgets: PAM is no longer a niche compliance tool, it’s core infrastructure spend on a multi-decade growth trajectory that outpaces much of the broader cybersecurity market.
The growth this forecast anticipates isn’t happening in a vacuum — it reflects a structural problem every enterprise security team is grappling with: privileged accounts have multiplied far beyond what traditional PAM deployments were designed to govern. A decade ago, “privileged access” meant a defined set of IT administrator accounts and root credentials on core infrastructure. Today it spans cloud console access across multiple providers, Kubernetes cluster admin rights, CI/CD pipeline credentials, database service accounts, and — increasingly — AI agents and automation scripts that require elevated permissions to complete their assigned tasks. The population requiring privileged access governance has expanded dramatically, and market spend is following that expansion.
Three trends are likely driving the sustained growth this forecast projects. First, regulatory pressure continues to intensify — from PCI-DSS and SOX requirements around privileged account controls to sector-specific mandates in finance and healthcare, compliance frameworks increasingly treat privileged access governance as a baseline control rather than best practice. Second, cyber insurance underwriting has become a meaningful commercial driver, with insurers increasingly requiring demonstrable privileged access management controls — including session recording, credential vaulting, and just-in-time elevation — as a condition of coverage or favorable premiums. Third, cloud and multi-cloud complexity has made manual privileged access governance operationally unworkable, forcing organisations toward automated PAM platforms simply to keep pace with the rate of new privileged accounts being created across dynamic infrastructure.
For IAM practitioners and budget owners, the practical takeaway is that privileged access management should be planned as a growing, permanent line item rather than a one-time deployment project. The scope of “privileged” access is not shrinking — it’s expanding to cover service accounts, AI agents, and ephemeral cloud resources — and platform investment needs to scale accordingly, with particular attention to session management capabilities that can handle both human administrators and the growing population of non-human privileged identities operating at machine speed.
Source: Business Upturn / SNS Insider