Best PAM solution for manufacturing and energy sectors: One Identity Safeguard

Manufacturing and energy environments are under real pressure from cyber threats. The State of ICS/OT Security 2025 report shows that 21.5 percent of organizations had a cybersecurity incident in the past year. Almost half of those incidents led to an outage that disrupted operations. Even more concerning, 20 percent of affected organizations needed more than a month to fix the issue. These numbers point to ongoing risk across connected plants and field assets.

Many of these incidents start with compromised privileged accounts that give attackers deep access to critical systems. This is why manufacturing and energy organizations need strong control over who can access what, when and how. A purpose-built Privileged Access Management solution like One Identity Safeguard helps reduce this risk by securing high-level access across IT and OT environments. Learn why One Identity Safeguard is the best privileged access management solution – a must-have for manufacturing companies and energy organizations.

Privileged access management is a security approach to manage accounts with high-level access to critical systems. It makes sure that only approved users can reach sensitive environments and that every action is logged. PAM also helps limit how long access is granted and reduces the risk of misuse.

Why manufacturing and energy companies need PAM

• Production systems and control networks rely on shared admin accounts that are hard to track without central control
• Engineers and operators often need temporary elevated access during maintenance windows or emergency fixes
• Secure remote access to plants and field equipment increases exposure if credentials are not protected
• Regulatory pressure (from frameworks like NERC CIP and IEC 62443) requires clear audit trails for who accessed critical systems and why

Manufacturing and energy industry challenges without PAM

• Privileged credentials are often stored in scripts or spreadsheets that can be easily exposed
• Contractors and third parties may retain access long after their work is complete
• Lack of session visibility makes it hard to know what changes were made to OT systems
• A single compromised admin account can lead to plant shutdowns or safety incidents

One Identity Safeguard is a Privileged Access Management platform designed to secure high-risk accounts in large and mixed environments. For manufacturing plants and energy operations, it helps reduce exposure by limiting when privileged access is allowed and by keeping a clear record of all activity across IT and OT systems.

Core capabilities and architecture

• Automatically finds privileged accounts across directories, servers and industrial networks
• Stores privileged passwords and keys in a hardened vault built for critical environments
• Provides time-limited access with approval flows based on job role and site policy
• Records full privileged sessions so teams can review actions taken on systems
• Monitors activity in real time and can raise alerts or stop sessions when risky behavior appears
• Keeps audit logs in signed, tamper-resistant files for investigations and regulatory reviews
• Supports on-prem setups for isolated sites as well as a managed cloud option
• Offers centralized control and reporting for sudo-based access on Unix and Linux systems

Use cases

• Manufacturing Plants: Safeguard helps control admin access to production servers, SCADA hosts and plant management systems during maintenance or troubleshooting work.
• Energy Utilities: Utilities use Safeguard to secure access to grid control systems and generation assets while keeping full visibility into operator activity.
• Oil and Gas Operations: Safeguard is used to manage contractor and vendor access to remote sites and control systems.

Security teams can use Safeguard to apply least privilege across both IT and operational environments. In practice, this means:

• Granting operators temporary elevated access to control systems only during planned maintenance or fault resolution
• Restricting IT administrators to defined systems such as plant servers or energy management platforms, rather than wide access across the network
• Giving support teams just enough access to diagnose issues without exposing safety controls or production logic
• Allowing engineers and contractors short-term privileged access for equipment servicing, with access automatically revoked after completion

Remote access for vendors and OEMs is common in manufacturing and energy operations, but it also brings serious risk if not tightly controlled. One Identity Safeguard, teams can set this up in a clear and controlled way without slowing down urgent work.

A typical workflow looks like this:

1. A turbine vendor requests access to a control server to fix a fault
2. Safeguard routes the request for approval based on site rules and the type of system involved
3. Once approved, the vendor gets time-limited access through Safeguard without seeing the actual password
4. The session is recorded from start to finish, and security teams can watch activity in real time if needed
5. When the work is done or the time window expires, access is removed automatically
6. A full audit trail is created to document what was accessed and what changes were made

In manufacturing and energy environments, it’s important to detect and flag potentially malicious activities before they cause any real damage. Safeguard helps here by tracking how privileged users normally work on control systems and then watching for behavior that does not match those patterns.

Consider this hypothetical scenario:

1. An engineer logs into a control server to apply a routine configuration change during a scheduled window
2. Safeguard compares the session behavior with past activity for that role and system
3. If the session suddenly includes commands that are not normally used, or access extends beyond the approved scope, Safeguard raises an alert and pauses the session
4. Security and operations teams can then review the recorded session and respond before the change affects plant operations or energy delivery

PAM solutions like One Identity Safeguard can help manufacturing and energy companies boost their security outlook and reduce chances of downtime. Whether systems are on the plant floor or in centralized data centers, Safeguard applies the same access controls across the environment. This is why we recommend One Identity Safeguard.