A low price tag for PAM software doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best overall value. Enterprise-scale PAM, like most software purchases, typically involves more than the initial license fee. Depending on your security goals, internal resources, and specific IT environment, you should anticipate additional costs when researching privileged access management pricing.
It’s important to identify the total cost of PAM ownership as clearly as you can prior to acquisition. Consider what you’ll need to spend over the first few months to get up and running, and over the coming years as your PAM program matures and evolves.
Make sure you aren’t surprised by hidden fees. The last thing you want to do is go “hat in hand” to your finance team to ask for additional, unexpected funding after your PAM project has already started.
Our PAM Total Cost of Ownership Checklist helps you ask critical questions and weigh all the cost factors so you can compare and budget before you invest in a PAM solution for your organization.
14 budget questions to ask before you buy your PAM software
- When comparing PAM vendors, am I comparing apples to apples for features? Not all PAM products cover the basic “must-have” PAM feature set, use this Gartner checklist to ensure you’re measuring every solution with the same yardstick.
- As I grow my PAM program, can I turn new features on myself, avoiding painful and costly upgrades, or do I need to go back to the software vendor and pay more for professional services to deploy additional software?
- If a cloud version of the solution is a better fit for my needs because of resource or expertise constraints, would I have the same PAM capabilities with a cloud version of the software as with an on-premise option, or is it limited in some way?
- If I choose an on-premise option, what type of infrastructure footprint will I need to build out to support the PAM architecture?
- Do I need a physical or virtual machine for every component of the PAM solution (vault, password rotation, web access, session monitoring and proxying, SSH key management, threat analytics, etc.), or can the solution scale up or down depending on my needs?
- If I need to manage more secrets or add more users, how well will my infrastructure scale before I need to make additional purchases?
- To achieve High Availability and redundancy, do I need to buy additional software components from the vendor and maintain them on-premise?
- Does the on-premise PAM architecture require me to purchase additional licenses for other types of software components and keep them up to date, like jump hosts?
- Can I manage the initial implementation and configuration work internally, or do I need to budget for professional services?
- If I do use professional services, how long is the work expected to take before the solution is fully available?
- How many full-time employees will I need to hire and train for ongoing privilege management?
- Can I manage software updates, including new functionality and security patches, with an internal team, or should I budget for the cost of ongoing professional services?
- To manage privileges for all devices and systems in my IT environment (including legacy or customer-built systems), will I need to pay for custom scripting?
- Are all the reporting capabilities I need included, or will I need to pay for professional services to create reports or purchase or integrate other software to manipulate and share reports?
Once you have all the information you can include all the factors in your PAM pricing calculations.
You may end up with a long list of potential software costs that previously were hidden. But, it’s better to know than be caught off guard.
You’ll be able to go to your finance team with a complete picture of the spend—as well as the value—of your PAM investment.
Contact us to talk about PAM pricing, products, or demos.
What does cybersecurity like this cost? Not as much as you think
