Akeyless Modern PAM vs Delinea PRA for cloud-native access

At a glance

What this is: This is an Akeyless comparison of modern PAM versus Delinea PRA, arguing that cloud-native environments need unified, ephemeral, Zero-Knowledge privileged access controls.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI programmes now have to govern human, machine, and workload access across hybrid estates without relying on static vaulting and manual orchestration.

By the numbers:

• Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system.
• Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a significant developer behaviour gap.

👉 Read Akeyless's comparison of modern PAM and Delinea PRA

Context

Modern privileged access has moved beyond human logins to include service accounts, APIs, certificates, cloud roles, and CI/CD credentials. The governance problem is no longer just where passwords are stored, but how access is issued, scoped, and expired across environments that change faster than manual controls can keep up.

The article frames Akeyless against Delinea as a contrast between legacy PAM assumptions and cloud-native identity operations. For IAM and PAM teams, the real issue is whether the control model still depends on standing secrets and infrastructure-heavy orchestration when the workload itself is temporary.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern privileged access in hybrid cloud environments?

A: Security teams should treat privileged access as a runtime governance problem, not just a vaulting problem. The practical goal is to issue short-lived credentials, bind them to workload or user context, and ensure expiry happens automatically. That approach reduces standing privilege, limits reuse across environments, and gives IAM teams a more reliable control model for hybrid estates.

Q: Why do static vaults struggle with cloud-native identity governance?

A: Static vaults assume access is persistent enough to store, retrieve, and review later. Cloud-native workloads often do not behave that way. Containers, pipelines, and serverless jobs need access for minutes, not days, so a stored secret becomes a standing liability. Governance breaks when the control model is slower than the workload lifecycle.

Q: What breaks when secrets are reused across pipelines and workloads?

A: Reusable secrets collapse separation between tasks, environments, and identities. A compromise in one pipeline can spill into other systems because the same credential remains valid beyond the original job. That creates lateral movement risk, weakens attribution, and makes offboarding incomplete unless every copy is found and revoked.

Q: Who is accountable when privileged access spans humans, machines, and automation?

A: Accountability sits with the identity owner and the programme that approved the access, not with the secret itself. When access spans humans, machines, and automation, teams need lifecycle ownership, policy enforcement, and audit evidence that show who can request access, who can approve it, and when it expires.

Technical breakdown

Static vaulting vs ephemeral credentials in modern PAM

Static vaulting assumes credentials can be stored, injected, and reused safely over time. That model breaks down in Kubernetes, serverless, CI/CD, and other short-lived environments where the identity should exist only for the duration of a task. Ephemeral credentials reduce standing exposure, but they also change governance: access must be issued just in time, bound to scope, and expired without human cleanup. The architectural difference is not cosmetic. It determines whether privileged access is anchored to a persistent secret or to a transient, policy-driven identity assertion.

Practical implication: map every long-lived credential path and decide where short-lived issuance can replace it.

Zero-Knowledge SaaS control planes and trust boundaries

A Zero-Knowledge architecture changes the trust model by limiting whether the platform can see the underlying secret material. In practice, that means the control plane can manage policy, issuance, and audit without becoming a place where plaintext credentials accumulate. This matters for compliance, but also for blast radius. If the platform never has full secret visibility, compromise of the service has a different impact profile than compromise of a vault that can reconstruct credentials. The key architectural question is not only encryption strength, but who can reconstruct access in the first place.

Practical implication: separate policy control from secret reconstruction in your architecture review.

Workload identity across hybrid and multi-cloud estates

Modern PAM is increasingly workload-aware because machine identities now span cloud roles, databases, containers, and automation pipelines. That requires tighter coupling between identity issuance, environment context, and session duration. Traditional PAM designed for RDP or SSH sessions does not fully solve the problem of API-driven or pipeline-driven access. The mechanism changes from centrally managed human elevation to distributed, runtime-issued credentials that must remain auditable across multiple execution environments. The governance challenge is consistency: the same privileged intent must be expressed across different identity types without relying on a single session workflow.

Practical implication: standardise privileged access policy across humans, workloads, and automation rather than treating them as separate tool chains.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker seeks durable privileged access that outlives the original task or session and can be reused across systems.

1. Entry occurs when long-lived secrets or vaulted credentials are available to the runtime environment for reuse across sessions and pipelines.
2. Escalation happens when those credentials provide broader access than the immediate task requires, especially in cloud-native and DevOps workflows.
3. Impact follows when standing access or reusable secrets enable lateral movement, overreach, or unplanned persistence across infrastructure boundaries.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Shai Hulud npm malware campaign — Shai Hulud campaign: npm malware exposed secrets on GitHub.
• Reviewdog GitHub Action supply chain attack — reviewdog/action-setup GitHub Action supply chain attack exposed secrets.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Standing secrets are the wrong abstraction for ephemeral infrastructure: A PAM model built around durable credentials was designed for environments where access could be issued once and reviewed later. That assumption fails when workloads are short-lived, pipelines are automated, and identity is instantiated at runtime. The implication is not just better rotation, but a different way of thinking about privileged access as a transient condition rather than a stored asset.

Zero-Knowledge shifts the trust boundary, but it does not remove governance responsibility: If a control plane cannot reconstruct secrets, the operational exposure changes, but ownership of issuance, scope, and lifecycle remains with the enterprise. This is where NHI governance stays central. Practitioners still need to know who can request access, under what policy, and for how long, because the absence of plaintext visibility does not eliminate privilege risk.

Ephemeral credential trust debt: The article points to a broader governance debt created when teams continue to depend on static vaulting while workloads move to cloud-native execution. The old control model assumes the credential is the stable object to govern. In modern environments, the stable object is the policy and the workload context, so the practitioner must treat persistent secrets as technical debt, not normal architecture.

Modern PAM is converging with NHI lifecycle governance: The article shows that privileged access, secrets management, and workload identity are no longer separable disciplines. Provisioning, rotation, audit, and offboarding now span human users, service accounts, and automation paths. That convergence means IAM teams should review whether their lifecycle controls can govern all privileged actors consistently, not just the ones that log in interactively.

From our research:

• 88% of security professionals are concerned about secrets sprawl, with 49% of those in larger organisations described as "very concerned", according to The 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey Report.
• Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system, which helps explain why manual governance still dominates many estates.
• For a deeper control model, see Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs for how provisioning, rotation, and offboarding fit together.

What this signals

Ephemeral credential trust debt: many programmes still govern privileged access as if credentials were durable assets, but modern workloads now demand runtime issuance and automatic expiry. That gap becomes visible when the same access path must serve containers, pipelines, cloud roles, and human admins without creating standing privilege.

If your PAM model still depends on orchestration-heavy vaulting, the next review should test whether policy can outlive infrastructure changes. Teams should compare their current design against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10, especially where identity issuance and expiry are still manual.

The practical signal to watch is whether privileged access can be issued, used, and revoked inside the same operational flow without leaving a reusable secret behind. If it cannot, the programme is still carrying legacy access assumptions into a cloud-native estate.

For practitioners

• Inventory standing privileged secrets first List every long-lived secret used for admin, pipeline, database, and cloud access, then classify which ones can be replaced by short-lived issuance and which still require temporary exception handling.
• Separate policy from secret reconstruction Review whether the control plane, operators, or downstream tools can reconstruct usable secrets, and remove any pathway that allows plaintext access beyond the minimum required for issuance and audit.
• Standardise privileged access across identity types Apply one governance model to human admin sessions, service accounts, and automation identities so entitlements, approval, and expiry behave consistently across the estate.
• Rework CI/CD access around task-scoped credentials Replace injected reusable secrets in pipelines with task-scoped credentials, then verify that credential expiry is enforced before job completion and not after manual cleanup.

Key takeaways

• Modern PAM is now a governance problem about runtime access, not just secret storage.
• The strongest evidence in this discussion is the scale of secrets sprawl and the persistence of manual remediation across hybrid estates.
• IAM and PAM teams should replace standing secret assumptions with task-scoped, lifecycle-aware privileged access controls.

Key terms

• Ephemeral Credential: A short-lived credential issued for a specific task or session and then revoked automatically. In modern PAM, ephemeral credentials reduce standing exposure and limit reuse across systems, but they only work when lifecycle, scope, and expiry are enforced by policy rather than manual cleanup.
• Zero-Knowledge Architecture: A design in which the service managing access does not retain the information needed to reconstruct the secret itself. For privileged access governance, this changes the trust boundary by separating policy enforcement from plaintext secret visibility, reducing the impact of provider-side compromise.
• Workload Identity: An identity assigned to software, infrastructure, or automation rather than a human user. It is used to authenticate tasks, pipelines, containers, and cloud services, and it must be governed as a lifecycle object with issuance, scope, rotation, and offboarding controls.
• Standing Privilege: Access that remains available beyond the immediate need for it. Standing privilege increases blast radius because the credential can be reused, abused, or forgotten, which is why modern identity programmes aim to replace it with task-scoped or just-in-time access.

What's in the full article

Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The exact feature comparison between Delinea PRA and Akeyless Modern PAM across deployment, session controls, and secret handling
• The platform-level claims about Zero-Knowledge design, Distributed Fragments Cryptography, and how the vendor describes secret visibility
• The detailed product matrix covering SSH, RDP, databases, Kubernetes, web apps, and cloud IAM workflows
• The vendor's own framing of scaling, rollout, and operational overhead for hybrid and multi-cloud environments

👉 Akeyless's full post details the platform comparison, architecture differences, and workload coverage.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.