Valentine’s Day is a reminder that long term commitment only works when trust is justified. In cybersecurity, there is one relationship many organizations have held onto for far too long, even though it has repeatedly proven unreliable. Passwords.
Passwords still play a central role in privileged access, yet they remain one of the most common sources of risk. They are forgotten, reused, shared, phished, and exposed. Even with strong policies and regular rotation, passwords remain vulnerable by design. The same applies to long lived credentials and static SSH keys that are often scattered across systems, scripts, and teams.
This creates a familiar situation for security leaders. Significant time and budget is spent on credential resets, emergency rotations, and damage control after access has been compromised.
But the underlying issue remains unchanged. If someone still has your keys, you can keep changing the locks, but you are still paying for a model that cannot scale. It is time to go keyless.
Modern infrastructure is dynamic. Access is needed across cloud platforms, production environments, containers, CI/CD pipelines, and automation tools. Users and services require elevated access temporarily, and targets may only exist for minutes. But traditional privileged access models are still built around persistent credentials, static keys, and standing privileges.
Over time, this results in credential sprawl, unclear ownership, and access paths that are difficult to track and even harder to remove. For attackers, this is an ideal environment. Compromised privileged credentials remain one of the fastest ways to escalate privileges and move laterally across critical systems.
PAM is often seen as a way to store passwords more securely. That is still part of the story, but it is not enough anymore. When privileged access is managed through permanent credentials, the organization ends up spending too much effort maintaining secrets that should not exist in the first place.
A modern PAM approach should reduce standing privileges and limit access to what is needed when it is needed. It should support temporary access, enforce policies consistently across environments, and provide clear visibility into privileged sessions. This is how privileged access becomes easier to control, easier to audit, and harder to abuse.
Many security strategies now aim to reduce or eliminate password based privileged access. This is a major improvement, but passwords are not the only credential type creating risk.
SSH keys, API keys, and other static authentication methods can become just as problematic. Once distributed, they are difficult to track and easy to copy. In practice, they often remain active far longer than intended.
This is why modern privileged access must be both passwordless and keyless.
With PrivX, access is granted based on identity, policy, and context, without relying on persistent credentials. Users receive access only when needed, for the required targets, and for the required duration. Privileged sessions can be monitored and recorded, and access is fully auditable. This approach supports Zero Trust and Zero Standing Privilege by design.
Credential rotation is necessary, but it should not be the main strategy. A stronger approach is to reduce the number of privileged credentials in circulation and limit privileged access to short lived, controlled sessions.
That shift reduces operational overhead and significantly lowers the attack surface.
This Valentine’s Day, consider whether passwords and static keys still deserve a place in privileged access. For many organizations, the smarter move is to move on.