In most of the organizations, a common administrative account is created and all the administrators use the same account to access the infrastructure - for instance 'Administrator' on Windows, 'root' on Unix/Linux, 'enable' on Cisco, 'sa' on SQL server etc.
These administrative passwords, also known as 'Shared Administrative Passwords', give unlimited access to the infrastructure to the extent that the user can do virtually anything. This practice brings along with it accountability issues since the super-user is not role-based and actions could not be traced back to a particular user.
PMP provides a robust solution for the problems in managing Shared Administrative Passwords. The password ownership concept and sharing mechanism ensures that only authorized users get access to the administrative passwords.