If privilege has changed, compliance can’t stay static. As organizations accelerate digital transformation, the compliance landscape is shifting beneath their feet—especially when it comes to how privileged access is controlled and proven. Regulatory requirements are multiplying, audit cycles are tightening, and the definition of privileged access has quietly expanded beyond people to workloads, automation, and AI-driven systems.
Building on insights from Gil Rapaport and Amy Blackshaw in the earlier installments of the series, it’s clear that the nature of privilege is fundamentally shifting. Gil’s recent analysis illustrates how organizations are moving from static credentials to dynamic, task‑based roles and entitlements, while Amy expands on what it takes to secure identities in real time across modern infrastructure. Together, their perspectives point to a central truth: as privilege becomes more dynamic and distributed, compliance strategies must evolve at the same pace.
In nearly every compliance discussion I’m part of, the same pattern emerges: teams believe privileged access is controlled but struggle to prove it consistently when audits begin. As these pressures intensify, organizations are increasingly leaning on privileged access management (PAM) to keep pace, often stretching legacy models beyond their intended scope.
According to a new CyberArk study of 500 U.S. IT practitioners, 80% of organizations now rely on PAM controls to meet regulatory requirements like PCI-DSS, SOX, HIPAA, DORA, and GDPR. The issue is not intent, it’s design. Traditional, static approaches rely on periodic reviews and manual evidence collection, which can’t keep pace with today’s hybrid, fast-moving environments, creating a compliance gap.
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this blog, it’s this: in today’s threat landscape, compliance is no longer something you prove after the fact; it’s something you achieve through unified, continuous control of identity and privilege.
Why static privilege controls create compliance risk
The inherent challenge of legacy compliance models is that they rely on tactics, such as static credentials, siloed tools, and after-the-fact reporting. The result is predictable: blind spots, slower audits, and a growing gap between what organizations believe is controlled and what they can actually prove—to auditors and themselves.
The data reinforces what many compliance and security leaders already feel day to day. The challenges cluster around these areas: audit friction, tool sprawl and visibility gaps:
- 72% of organizations say manual processes and evidence collection delay audits
- 74% say manual compliance tasks for privileged access consume significant time
- 71% report that managing multiple vendors decreases compliance and audit efficiency
- 45% admit that managing multiple privileged access tools creates visibility blind spots—making it difficult to prove who had access to what, and when
Meanwhile, attackers know that gaps between privilege controls and inconsistent enforcement are prime targets. And compliance teams? They’re unable to give these security gaps the attention they need because their efforts are buried in manual “box-ticking” exercises that drain resources and delay the business.
I’ve seen teams pass reviews on paper, only to spend weeks during audits reconstructing access paths that should have been visible in real time.
Unified, continuously controlled identity security as a compliance driver
What we’re seeing in practice is a clear shift. Organizations that treat identity security as a dynamic, continuously evolving process rather than a static asset are far better positioned to keep up with modern compliance demands. The future of privilege is built on four pillars of identity security:
1. Access reviews, simplified through zero standing privileges
Auditors increasingly expect proof that no identity—human, machine, or AI—should have permanent access by default. Instead, access should be granted just-in-time (JIT), scoped to the task, and revoked immediately after. Yet, even while acknowledging the importance of zero standing privileges (ZSP), only 1% of organizations have eliminated standing privileges entirely. For 91%, standing access still accounts for at least half of all privileged access—creating a persistent compliance gap that’s difficult to explain to auditors and impossible to defend against attackers. Access reviews become simpler because there is no persistent access to review. Instead of proving that excessive access was not abuse, organizations can prove that excessive access never existed in the first place.
2. Unified control
PAM, access management, and operations must operate as a single, coordinated system to support consistent security across identities. Polices are defined once, enforced consistently and proven centrally. This unified approach supports consistent policy enforcement, real-time visibility, and seamless auditability across all environments. Compliance becomes simpler, stronger, and easier to demonstrate because there is a single source of truth for who can access what, why, and under what controls.
However, this lofty goal still seems more a vision than a reality. Today, only 11% of organizations have achieved a single unified platform for privileged access. For auditors, the impact is immediate: multiple tools mean fragmented evidence, longer audits, and more exceptions. The rest—88%—are juggling numerous tools, creating fragmented audit trails and inconsistent controls. When auditors ask, “Who had access and why?” the most challenging part is not the answer. It’s pulling together evidence and artifacts spread across too many tools.
3. Continuous monitoring and automated response, summarized by AI
To help ensure identity security throughout the identity lifecycle, privileged sessions should be monitored in real time, with anomalies triggering automated investigation or remediation. Session logs and audit trails should be automatically captured, providing auditors with instant evidence. This matters: 81% of organizations agree that automated reporting improves audit efficiency.
4. Secure at birth
The biggest compliance gaps occur when new identities or infrastructure are created without controls in place. Secure at Birth closes that gap. By applying identity and privilege policies at creation, every new identity, service, and workload can start out secure and compliant from day one. Compliance is no longer retrofitted after deployment, but is built into how environments are created and scaled.
Collectively, these pillars reflect how identity security is approached in modern compliance contexts.
Identity security and compliance in a shared framework
When privilege is managed dynamically, consistently and with the right controls, compliance becomes a byproduct of how access works, not a separate process bolted on after the fact. A natural outcome, not a separate, burdensome process. Consider the alternative: 54% of organizations discover unmanaged privileged accounts at least weekly, and 63% of them admit that employees regularly bypass controls to get work done.
That’s not a compliance posture—it’s an identity security liability.
Unified identity security platforms change this equation. They can help organizations to:
- Instantly produce audit-ready reports showing who accessed what, when, and why
- Prove to auditors that only authorized users performed authorized actions, with full session context and activity
- Eliminate the blind spots created by tool sprawl and manual processes
- Respond to new regulatory requirements without rearchitecting controls or processes, allowing you to mature as your infrastructure changes.
Building compliance resilience for an AI-driven future
As identities multiply and AI-powered workflows become the norm, the only scalable path to compliance is through unified, adaptive privilege management. By integrating identity threat detection and response (ITDR) and compliance into a single workflow, organizations can close identity security gaps before attackers exploit them—and before auditors come knocking.
What’s changed most in recent years is not the regulations themselves; it’s the pace of access. Compliance models built for foundational environments show their limits.
The future of identity security compliance is continuous assurance: always-on, always-auditable, always current, and always aligned with the speed of business.
In environments that change by the hour, compliance only works when privilege does too.
Yaarit Natan is vice president of PAM Solutions at CyberArk.
See what’s next for compliance
Join us for In Control: The 2026 Compliance Series, a two-part webinar kicking off on January 22 with “Compliance at Cloud Speed” and continuing January 29 with “Continuous Compliance in Action.” Learn how identity security helps organizations stay audit-ready in 2026 and beyond. And, to go deeper into the forces reshaping privilege and identity security, you can also explore the recent perspectives that shaped this blog series.
