CyberArk vs. Delinea exposes the limits of traditional PAM

At a glance

What this is: This is a vendor comparison of CyberArk and Delinea that concludes traditional PAM still leaves gaps in modern infrastructure access and lifecycle governance.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM teams need privileged access controls that work across NHI, human, and hybrid infrastructure without creating unmanaged exceptions or productivity bottlenecks.

By the numbers:

• Our recent Access-Productivity Report found that infrastructure access affects the productivity of 64% of companies.

👉 Read StrongDM's comparison of CyberArk and Delinea for privileged access teams

Context

Privileged Access Management is the control layer that governs elevated access to systems, databases, servers, and sensitive operational tools. In this comparison, the real issue is not which product has more features, but whether traditional PAM can still keep pace with cloud, Kubernetes, and modern access patterns that change faster than legacy workflows.

The article frames a familiar enterprise tension: security teams want strong control over privileged credentials, while platform and engineering teams need access that does not stall delivery. That tension now extends across NHI governance, access review, and offboarding, because the problem is not only who gets access, but how quickly that access can be granted, monitored, and removed.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern privileged access across cloud and Kubernetes environments?

A: They should require the same privileged access policy to cover servers, databases, containers, and third-party access paths, then verify that the tooling can enforce it without manual exceptions. The key test is whether access can be granted, monitored, and revoked at the pace operations actually require, not just whether secrets can be stored in a vault.

Q: What breaks when traditional PAM only covers vaulting and session recording?

A: The control breaks at lifecycle and scope. Vaulting can protect credentials at rest, and session recording can show what happened after access was granted, but neither guarantees that access was appropriate, short-lived, or removed on time. That leaves privilege creep, shared access, and delayed offboarding as recurring governance failures.

Q: When should organisations prioritise PAM replacement over more tuning?

A: They should consider replacement when the tool cannot support the environments they already run, especially Kubernetes, cloud-native workflows, and delegated third-party access. If the platform requires repeated exceptions to stay usable, the organisation is already paying a hidden governance cost in shadow access and manual workarounds.

Q: What is the difference between vaulting secrets and governing privileged access?

A: Vaulting secrets protects credentials, while governing privileged access controls who can use them, under what conditions, and how quickly they are revoked. A strong PAM programme needs both. If the organisation only stores secrets securely, it can still fail on entitlement scope, session misuse, and offboarding.

Technical breakdown

Privileged credential vaulting and rotation

Traditional PAM tools focus on storing privileged secrets in a vault and rotating them on a policy schedule. That model reduces direct exposure, but it still assumes access is tied to stable accounts, known systems, and manageable lifecycle events. In modern environments, privileged identity is often spread across service accounts, automation, and third-party access paths, which makes the vault only one part of the control plane. The operational risk is that credentials can be protected at rest while the access model around them remains fragmented and slow to govern.

Practical implication: map where privileged secrets live, who can use them, and how quickly they can be revoked across every environment.

Session monitoring and access recording

Session controls are designed to watch what privileged users do after access is granted. They are useful for auditability, but they do not solve the upstream question of whether the right identity received the right privilege in the first place. This matters in hybrid environments where access may be brokered through multiple systems, delegated to third parties, or created for short-lived operational work. Monitoring can show misuse, but it cannot compensate for poor entitlement design or incomplete offboarding.

Practical implication: pair session logging with entitlement review and offboarding controls so audit data is not your only defense.

Kubernetes and modern infrastructure access

The article repeatedly points to a structural limitation in legacy PAM: many tools were built around servers and databases, not container orchestration or modern cloud-native workflows. Kubernetes changes the access problem because workloads, operators, and tooling often need ephemeral, scoped, and frequently changing permissions. If the platform cannot support that pattern cleanly, teams build exceptions, share credentials, or bypass controls to keep work moving. That is where governance weakens, even if the vault itself is functioning as designed.

Practical implication: test whether your PAM model can govern containerized and cloud-native access without forcing users into exceptions.

Breaches seen in the wild

• BeyondTrust API key breach — compromised BeyondTrust API key led to unauthorized SaaS access.
• MongoBleed breach — MongoBleed exposed secrets across 87K MongoDB servers.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Traditional PAM still assumes access is more static than modern infrastructure allows. Vaulting, rotation, and session recording all help, but they were designed around privileged accounts that can be named, reviewed, and governed on a predictable cadence. In cloud and Kubernetes environments, access is often ephemeral, delegated, and distributed across systems, which makes the older control model incomplete. The implication is that privileged access governance now has to cover lifecycle, context, and runtime behaviour together.

Onboarding and offboarding are the real stress test for PAM programmes. The article’s own critique points to a governance gap, not just a feature gap: tools that are hard to deploy or hard to maintain often lead to delayed revocation, shared access, and policy exceptions. That is where privilege creep begins. Practitioners should treat access lifecycle as the measure of PAM maturity, not just vault coverage or session capture.

Modern infrastructure access is increasingly an NHI problem as much as a human one. Service accounts, automation credentials, and integrated tooling now sit alongside human admins in the same privileged estate. That means PAM cannot be evaluated only on user workflows, because many of the highest-risk credentials are non-human identities with longer-lived or less visible exposure paths. Teams need one governance model that can see across both human and machine privilege.

Legacy PAM’s complexity is itself a control risk. When implementation and upgrade paths are too heavy, teams defer adoption, leave exclusions in place, or route around controls to preserve velocity. That weakens the governance outcome even where the product technically exists. The practical conclusion is simple: a control that cannot be operated consistently at scale becomes a partial control, not a complete one.

From our research:

• 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
• That lifecycle gap is why practitioners should also review Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs before treating PAM as complete.

What this signals

Privileged access programmes are being judged less by feature checklists and more by operational fit. If a PAM platform cannot support cloud-native infrastructure, delegated access, and fast revocation without friction, teams will route around it. The result is not just lower security, but a governance model that quietly accumulates exceptions until it no longer matches reality.

Access-productivity trade-offs are now a board-level design issue. When infrastructure access affects the productivity of 64% of companies, privileged access control stops being a narrow security conversation and becomes an operating model decision. Practitioners should look for controls that reduce risk without forcing engineers into unmanaged shortcuts.

Legacy PAM often leaves a lifecycle gap that shows up as hidden privilege debt. In practice, that means standing access lingers after projects end, vendors change, or teams move. The programme signal to watch is not how many secrets are vaulted, but how consistently access disappears when it should.

For practitioners

• Inventory privileged access by actor type Separate human administrators, service accounts, automation credentials, and third-party access into distinct governance lanes so you can see where privileged scope and lifecycle differ.
• Test offboarding speed against real workflows Measure how long it takes to revoke access after a role change, vendor exit, or project completion, then compare that against the access paths actually used in production.
• Validate Kubernetes support before standardising PAM Check whether your PAM model can handle containerized environments without shared secrets, manual exception handling, or separate unmanaged workflows.
• Use session monitoring as evidence, not as the control boundary Treat recorded sessions as audit proof and incident context, then verify that entitlements, rotation, and revocation are enforced upstream.

Key takeaways

• The comparison shows that traditional PAM still struggles where modern access is dynamic, delegated, and distributed.
• The scale of the lifecycle problem is visible in NHI research, where 71% of identities are not rotated on time.
• Practitioners should evaluate PAM on offboarding speed, Kubernetes fit, and lifecycle coverage, not just vaulting and session logs.

Key terms

• Privileged Access Management: Privileged Access Management is the discipline of controlling and auditing elevated access to systems, data, and administrative tools. It combines secret storage, session oversight, entitlement control, and revocation so high-risk access is visible, limited, and removable when roles or work change.
• Offboarding: Offboarding is the process of removing access when a person, service account, vendor, or system no longer needs it. In privileged environments, it includes revoking credentials, closing sessions, and clearing downstream entitlements so old access does not survive the business need.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is persistent elevated access that remains available without being provisioned for a specific task. It increases exposure because the identity can act immediately, so governance teams try to replace it with shorter-lived, task-scoped access wherever possible.
• Session Recording: Session recording captures what a privileged user or process does after access is granted. It supports audit and investigation, but it does not by itself prove the access was correctly scoped or removed on time, so it must be paired with entitlement and lifecycle controls.

Deepen your knowledge

Privileged access governance and lifecycle control are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If your team is trying to extend PAM into modern infrastructure, this is the right starting point.

This post draws on content published by StrongDM: CyberArk vs. Delinea (Thycotic & Centrify): Which Is Better? Read the original.