Entra Privileged Identity Management decides when a person's own account holds an admin role. Privileged access management decides who can use a privileged credential, proves how they got it, and changes it afterward.
Renewal questionnaires and auditors ask about both. Most teams on Microsoft 365 have neither fully in place.
PIM makes admin roles time-bound. Instead of a permanent Global Administrator assignment, a user is eligible for the role and activates it for a few hours, with a justification, MFA, and optionally an approver. It covers Entra directory roles, Azure resource roles and group membership, and it adds access reviews.
If you have it, use it. It is the right control for the question "does anyone hold a standing admin role?"
PIM requires Microsoft Entra ID P2 or Entra ID Governance for the users who use it.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium, the plan most small and mid-sized organizations run, includes Entra ID P1. P1 does not include PIM.
PAM-Pro's core controls work on any Entra ID license. Risk-signal features use P2 or Business Premium signals when they are there, and are skipped when they are not.
PIM elevates a named person's own account. A lot of privileged access does not work that way: the break-glass Global Admin two people know the password to, the service account a vendor logs in with, the shared admin login for a firewall or a line-of-business app. Those are credentials, not role assignments, and they are where PAM starts.
| Control | Entra PIM | PAM-Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Time-bound admin role on a person's own account | Yes, the core of PIM | Works alongside PIM; approval workflows can confirm a PIM elevation |
| Vault shared, break-glass and service account passwords | No | Yes, in your own Azure Key Vault under your Tenant Root Key |
| Check a credential out, time-limited, with a ticket ID | No | Yes, just-in-time checkout with expiry |
| Change the password after use | No | Yes, automatic rotation on check-in |
| MFA recorded on each credential release | MFA on role activation | Per-checkout record of whether the sign-in was MFA-backed; checkouts without it are refused and logged |
| Discover privileged accounts nobody is managing | Shows role assignments | Hourly discovery with unmanaged privileged accounts flagged |
| History you can produce at renewal | Entra audit logs, kept 30 days unless you export them | Write-once (WORM) history with the retention you set, forwarded to Sentinel or Splunk |
| Dated evidence pack for an insurer or auditor | No | Yes, mapped to HIPAA, SOC 2, NIST 800-53 and PCI-DSS v4.0 |
Keep PIM for role activation. Add PAM-Pro for the credentials PIM cannot hold (break-glass, service and shared accounts), for rotation after use, and for the dated evidence your insurer and auditor ask for.
You do not have PIM. PAM-Pro takes standing access off your privileged accounts with MFA-gated, time-limited checkout and rotation, without a P2 upgrade for every admin, and produces the same evidence pack.
Not on its own. PIM provides just-in-time activation of admin roles on a user's own account. It does not vault shared or break-glass passwords, check credentials out, rotate them after use, or produce an evidence pack. Those are privileged access management controls.
No. Business Premium includes Microsoft Entra ID P1. PIM requires Entra ID P2 or Microsoft Entra ID Governance.
Yes. PIM handles role activation on named accounts; PAM-Pro handles the privileged credentials, their rotation, and the evidence. PAM-Pro approval workflows can include confirming a PIM elevation.
It answers the standing-access question for role assignments. Questionnaires also ask about vaulting privileged credentials, MFA on every privileged elevation, and producing records of privileged activity, which is where most teams need more than PIM.
PAM-Pro starts with discovery: every privileged account in your tenant, and which ones nobody is managing, before anything changes.