Today’s secure credential is tomorrow’s quantum breach. Is your protection already obsolete?

In a world of increasing vulnerabilities, Privileged Access Management (PAM) has become essential for safeguarding credentials across people, machines, and applications. But what happens if your security vault goes dark? For many, operations grind to a halt.

AccessMatrix UCM is a next-generation PAM platform designed for complete resilience. Built on 25 years of AccessMatrix heritage trusted by the banking and government sectors, UCM provides robust, post-quantum powered security to protect your organization’s most valuable assets.

Unpacking the Next Generation of Privileged Access Management

In the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, Privileged Access Management (PAM) is more critical than ever. The focus is expanding beyond just protecting people to securing machines and applications as well. One platform, AccessMatrix UCM, is addressing these modern challenges with a solution built on a 25-year heritage and fortified with post-quantum cryptography. A key innovation is its ability to keep machine identities running even when the central PAM system is temporarily unavailable, ensuring operations don’t grind to a halt during a disaster.

Why PAM Is Critical in 2025

The transition of PAM from a “nice to have” to a “non-negotiable” security control is driven by the explosion of attack surfaces due to remote work, multi-cloud environments, containers, and automation. Threat actors actively target admin credentials and privileged tokens, as a single compromise can cascade across an entire organization. The risk is no longer limited to human users; service accounts, API keys, and application credentials are now powerful and often less visible targets. In response, regulatory frameworks like ISO, NIST, PCI, and GDPR demand strong controls such as least privilege, audited sessions, and a secure secrets lifecycle—all functions of a modern PAM solution. Today’s PAM must deliver identity, telemetry, and resilience for both humans and machines.

The AccessMatrix Advantage

AccessMatrix UCM is built upon the AccessMatrix access control core, a technology with 25 years of proven, performance-hardened experience in high-security sectors like banking. UCM enhances this foundation by incorporating post-quantum ready encryption, which ensures that long-lived credentials and session recordings remain secure against future cryptographic threats.

What Makes UCM Different

AccessMatrix UCM stands out with five key differentiators:

• Offline Cache APM (Application Password Management):
  This unique feature provides resilience for machine identities. For service accounts, API keys, and other machine credentials, UCM can deploy an offline cache at the connector or agent level. If the core UCM platform or network is down, approved applications can continue to function using cryptographically sealed, time-bounded cached secrets. This disaster-tolerant design keeps critical batch jobs, middleware, and robotic processes running during outages. Once connectivity is restored, all rotations and checkouts resume syncing with the core system. The cache itself is designed for security, featuring policy-scoping, time-to-live (TTL) controls, tamper-evident construction, and post-event audit reconciliation. For many organizations, this focus on availability is a form of security itself, preventing security incidents caused by operational downtime.

• Off-Business Hours Workflow:
  UCM allows for context-aware approvals, enabling organizations to implement step-up checks or require additional approvers for access requests made outside of normal business hours, which is a valuable control against insider risk.

• Agentless Coverage:
  The platform provides rapid onboarding for systems where installing agents is impractical, such as legacy servers, OT networks, or tightly controlled appliances.

• Application Password Management (APM):
  Going beyond human users, UCM manages the full lifecycle for service IDs, scripts, database accounts, and API tokens, including rotation, checkout, injection, and reconciliation.

• Post-Quantum Powered Security & Integrated Audit Intelligence: UCM provides long-term cryptographic resilience combined with built-in reporting features that simplify and accelerate compliance reviews.

Real-World Moments

The practical benefits of UCM are demonstrated in several use cases:

• Financial Services:
  An organization consolidated its privileged vaults, reduced credential sprawl by approximately 80%, and significantly cut audit preparation time using UCM’s auto-generated evidence.
• Energy/Utilities:
  A company utilized agentless session control to secure fragile OT systems where endpoint agents could not be installed due to tight change windows.
• Resilience Under Pressure:
  During a data center incident that cut off connectivity to the main PAM system, a client’s critical operations continued without interruption. Because Offline Cache APM was enabled for key middleware and schedulers, batch runs continued and jobs were completed. When the UCM core came back online, the system automatically reconciled all activities, syncing checkouts, rotations, and full audit trails.

Best Practices for Modern PAM

For organizations beginning to implement a serious PAM strategy, a three-step approach is recommended:

1. Discover & Prioritize:
   Begin by inventorying all privileged identities, including both humans and machines. Prioritize based on high-impact access paths, such as domain admins, core databases, CI/CD runners, and integration accounts.
2. Design for Resilience:
   Plan for both security and continuity. Use the Offline Cache APM feature for critical machine-based workflows, ensuring it is configured with strict TTLs, limited scope, and least privilege principles. Failover and reconciliation processes should be tested regularly, just like data backups.
3. Integrate to Reduce Friction:
   To drive adoption, integrate PAM with existing enterprise systems like SSO/IGA, ticketing, SIEM/SOAR, and DevOps toolchains. When PAM makes work easier through features like credential injection and just-in-time elevation, its adoption rate increases significantly.

Deep Dive: Machine Identities with Offline Cache APM

Properly managing machine identities turns a hidden risk into a governed, resilient system. This is achieved through four key principles:

• Secret Injection, Not Sharing:
  Applications should never “know” a password; instead, they receive it just-in-time through a secure channel.
• Short Leases & Rotation:
  By reducing the “useful lifetime” of any secret, the potential blast radius of a compromise is shrunk.
• Offline Cache, Online Control:
  Pre-authorize offline scenarios using tight policies. When the central system is back online, a full reconciliation occurs to show who used what, when, and where.
• Crypto Hygiene:
  All data should be encrypted at rest and in motion with a post-quantum roadmap to protect long-term artifacts like backups, recordings, and logs

The Future of UCM: UEBA & PEDM

The UCM roadmap is focused on two main pillars:

• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) for PAM (Roadmap):
  This involves integrating UEBA tailored to privileged activity. The goal is to detect anomalies—such as unusual login locations, atypical times, new lateral movement paths, or rare commands—in near real-time. The telemetry and analytical models will align with the platform’s post-quantum crypto posture for long-term data confidentiality.
• PEDM — Privileged Elevation & Delegation Management (Roadmap):
  This future capability aims to grant just-enough, just-in-time privilege at the endpoint. It will replace standing admin rights with expiring elevations, rich command policies, and session evidence, making least privilege a practical reality for desktop, server, and DevOps teams.

Adopting vs. Installing

Successful implementation of UCM focuses on adoption rather than just a sale. The recommended strategy is to:

1. Start with a single, high-stakes area, like domain administrators or a mission-critical application chain.
2. Demonstrate clear operational wins, such as the business continuity provided by Offline Cache APM, the convenience of credential injection, and the simplicity of one-click audit reports.
3. Measure what matters, including fewer outages caused by secrets, faster audit cycles, reduced administrative time, and a smaller overall attack surface.
4. Expand with internal champions. When application owners and SREs see the platform results in fewer 2 a.m. emergency calls, they become advocates for pulling UCM into more teams.

Conclusion: Security and Resilience Combined

AccessMatrix UCM is engineered to address the future of cybersecurity by protecting both humans and machines with a platform that is post-quantum powered and built on 25 years of proven heritage. Its unique Offline Cache APM capability ensures that continuity is non-negotiable, allowing organizations to design for least privilege and business resilience at the same time.