Stupid question about PAM

What exactly is PAM? It's coming up in meetings at my office that we might want to look into PAM. It's not something I'm familiar with. Based on the descriptions I see, I can't for the life of me tell how it's functionally different from simple IAM.

As an example use case: Help Desk Henry needs to do some privileged tasks. Under IAM, his admin account is assigned to the group with admin rights, so he uses his admin account …

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