Understanding Entra Privileged Identity Management, What PIM Covers and Where It Stops

Entra ID’s built-in Privileged Identity Management service (PIM) promises to help you achieve zero standing privileges for the Entra/Azure/M365 environment by giving users temporary, on-demand permissions instead of permanent admin rights. 

In this real training for free event, we will dive into Entra PIM.  First, I’ll provide a brief overview of the foundation of how privilege normally works in the Entra/Azure world in terms of permission, groups, roles and role assignments.

Then I'll introduce PIM and show you how it works from both sides of the process. We'll walk through configuring eligibility assignments, activation policies, approval workflows, time-bound access policies, and authentication requirements.

After that, we'll follow the experience of an IT administrator who needs temporary authority to resolve a support ticket or perform an operational task, from requesting role activation and obtaining approval through completing the work and automatically returning to a least-privileged state when access expires.  By the end, you'll understand not only how PIM is configured but also what day-to-day privileged access actually looks like for both administrators and security teams.

Next, we'll explore what the audit trail looks like and how you can review privileged activity after the fact. We'll examine the logs generated by role activations, approval decisions, and assignment changes, and look at how security and identity teams can answer common questions such as:

• Who activated a role?
• Why was access requested?
• Who approved it?
• When was the privilege actually used?

Finally, we'll discuss the limits of Entra PIM and where it fits within a broader Zero Standing Privilege strategy. While PIM provides powerful just-in-time access controls for Microsoft environments, organizations often require cross-platform governance, richer approval workflows, better visibility into existing privileged access, and more granular entitlement management than PIM was designed to provide. Understanding these boundaries will help you determine when PIM alone is sufficient and when complementary technology may be needed.

Then Graham Hayes, Sr Solutions Engineer, and David van Heerden, Sr Product Marketing Manager from my sponsor BeyondTrust, will demonstrate how Entitle covers PIM’s weaknesses and extends these capabilities across a broader set of platforms, identities, and access scenarios.

Please join us for this real training for free session.