PAM controls for cloud and Kubernetes access: BeyondTrust vs Delinea

At a glance

What this is: This is StrongDM’s comparison of BeyondTrust and Delinea, with the central finding that traditional PAM approaches strain under modern cloud, Kubernetes, and distributed access patterns.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI teams need a control model that fits modern infrastructure access without creating new credential, audit, or offboarding gaps.

👉 Read StrongDM's comparison of BeyondTrust and Delinea for PAM buyers

Context

Privileged access management only works when the control plane matches the environment it governs. In cloud and Kubernetes-heavy estates, legacy assumptions about server-bound administration, static credentials, and slow change cycles create gaps for both human admins and non-human credentials.

The article compares BeyondTrust and Delinea through that operational lens, then positions StrongDM as an alternative for modern infrastructure access. The real governance question is not feature parity, but whether the access model reduces credential exposure, centralises logging, and supports fast-moving infrastructure without expanding privilege sprawl.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams evaluate PAM for cloud and Kubernetes access?

A: Teams should test whether the PAM platform can broker access without exposing reusable credentials, log sessions centrally, and support cloud-native resources without requiring brittle per-server installation. The right question is not whether the tool has PAM features, but whether it can govern modern infrastructure access with clean audit evidence and workable identity integration.

Q: Why do secrets vaults alone not solve privileged access risk?

A: A vault protects secrets at rest, but it does not eliminate the need for a user or workflow to retrieve and use them. If access still depends on direct credential handling, the exposure window remains, and auditability is weaker than with mediated access. The control objective is to reduce who ever sees the secret.

Q: What breaks when a PAM tool is built for static servers instead of modern infrastructure?

A: Onboarding slows, credential distribution becomes more manual, and cloud or container access may fall outside the platform’s strongest controls. That leads to inconsistent policy enforcement and weaker evidence for reviews and investigations. In practice, the gap shows up as teams keeping parallel access paths for faster work.

Q: Who is accountable when privileged access logs are incomplete?

A: Accountability sits with the team that owns the privileged access control plane, because access reviews, forensic reconstruction, and compliance evidence all depend on complete logs. If the platform cannot tie a session to a real identity and resource, the governance process is already impaired. That is a control-design issue, not just an operations issue.

Technical breakdown

Why traditional PAM struggles with cloud and Kubernetes

Traditional PAM was built around controlling privileged sessions to servers, databases, and endpoints that changed slowly and could be managed from a central estate. Cloud and Kubernetes break that model because identities, workloads, and access paths are more dynamic, more distributed, and often short-lived. When a product depends on installing software on every target or managing access through per-system credentials, it can struggle to match the pace of infrastructure change. That creates friction in onboarding, auditing, and least-privilege enforcement across modern environments.

Practical implication: assess whether your PAM stack can govern cloud-native and containerised resources without forcing teams back to static credentials or server-local controls.

Secrets vaulting versus access brokering

The comparison highlights two different control patterns. Secrets vaulting protects credentials at rest and can rotate passwords or store keys safely, but users still need a path to use those secrets. Access brokering shifts the control point so users connect through a managed plane and never directly handle the underlying credential. That distinction matters because hidden credentials reduce exposure and simplify auditing, especially where SSH keys, database passwords, and service access are spread across teams. It also changes how administrators prove who accessed what, and when.

Practical implication: separate secret protection from access mediation in your design review, because storing credentials securely does not by itself eliminate direct access risk.

Centralised logging as an audit control

Strong auditability is a core differentiator in modern privileged access design because access reviews are only as good as the evidence behind them. Centralised logging captures who connected, what resource they reached, and what activity occurred during the session. In environments with distributed teams and mixed infrastructure, that becomes the basis for forensics, certification, and policy enforcement. A tool that makes audit evidence easy to extract reduces the operational cost of compliance, but only if the logs are complete and tied to real identities and sessions.

Practical implication: verify that your PAM platform produces session-level evidence that can support access reviews, incident response, and compliance reporting without manual reconstruction.

Breaches seen in the wild

• MongoBleed breach — MongoBleed exposed secrets across 87K MongoDB servers.
• IOS app secrets leakage report — iOS apps leaking hardcoded secrets and credentials endangering user privacy.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Modern PAM is now a governance model, not just a vaulting layer. The article shows that the practical debate has moved beyond password storage into how access is brokered, logged, and revoked across cloud, Kubernetes, and distributed admin work. That makes PAM part of identity governance, not a stand-alone control. Practitioners should treat privileged access as a lifecycle problem that spans provisioning, session control, and offboarding.

Credential hiding matters most where human and non-human access collide. The strongest operational issue in this comparison is not interface preference, but whether users ever touch reusable credentials in the first place. When admins, service workflows, and automation all rely on the same access paths, hidden credentials reduce exposure and simplify accountability. Teams should evaluate whether their current PAM design still leaves secrets visible to the people and systems that use them.

Privileged access for cloud infrastructure needs a control plane that can follow the workload, not the server. The article’s cloud and Kubernetes focus points to a broader shift in the market: infrastructure access is moving toward dynamic brokerage, centralised policy, and session evidence. That direction aligns with NHI governance because machine and human access now share the same audit and containment requirements. Practitioners should re-check whether their PAM tool is built for static estates or for live infrastructure change.

Access visibility is the real governance test, not product category labels. The comparison makes clear that buyers need to judge whether a platform can provide complete session evidence, consistent policy enforcement, and workable integration with existing identity systems. Those are governance outcomes, not feature bullets. The practical conclusion is to measure how much privilege remains implicit in daily operations before deciding which PAM model fits.

Lifecycle discipline is the named concept this comparison exposes. Privileged access systems fail when credential issuance, use, review, and revocation are treated as separate tasks instead of one lifecycle. That assumption breaks down in modern environments where access is frequent, distributed, and often tied to non-human workflows. Practitioners should rethink privilege as a managed lifecycle across humans and non-human identities, not as a one-time setup.

From our research:

• 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is why access brokerage and auditability matter in modern PAM design.
• For the underlying governance model, review NHI Lifecycle Management Guide for rotation, offboarding, and visibility controls that reduce long-lived access risk.

What this signals

Lifecycle discipline is becoming the dividing line in PAM selection. Teams that still treat privileged access as a point product will keep carrying hidden credential risk into cloud and container operations. The better test is whether the control plane can support rotation, revocation, and evidence across the full access lifecycle without forcing exceptions into daily work.

As infrastructure becomes more distributed, the governance model must follow the session, not the hostname. That means PAM, NHI controls, and identity review workflows need to be evaluated together, especially where the same team manages both human admin access and non-human service credentials.

For practitioners

• Map privileged access to environment type Separate server-bound administration, cloud control-plane access, and Kubernetes access in your inventory. Each requires different evidence, integration, and session-handling assumptions, so a single PAM design decision should not be applied everywhere.
• Test whether credentials remain visible to operators Check if admins, contractors, or support teams can still retrieve reusable secrets directly during routine work. If they can, the control model is exposing credentials instead of brokering access and the audit burden stays high.
• Validate session-level evidence for audits Confirm that the platform records who accessed which resource, from where, and what they did during the session. Use that evidence to support access reviews, incident response, and compliance reporting without manual log stitching.
• Review onboarding and offboarding paths for privileged users Trace how a new admin receives access and how it is removed when the role changes or ends. If those steps depend on manual credential sharing or inconsistent revocation, the platform is adding governance friction instead of reducing it.

Key takeaways

• The article shows that PAM decisions now hinge on whether access can be brokered and audited across cloud-native environments, not just protected on traditional servers.
• Traditional vaulting still leaves meaningful risk if operators or workflows can retrieve and reuse secrets directly.
• Practical evaluation should focus on evidence quality, lifecycle handling, and whether the platform reduces credential exposure across human and non-human access paths.

Key terms

• Privileged Access Management: Privileged access management is the discipline of controlling high-risk administrative access to systems, databases, and infrastructure. It covers session brokering, credential protection, logging, and revocation so that elevated access is tightly governed rather than simply granted.
• Access Brokerage: Access brokerage is a pattern where users connect through a control plane instead of handling underlying credentials directly. It reduces secret exposure, centralises policy enforcement, and improves auditability because the user never receives the reusable password or key.
• Session-level Evidence: Session-level evidence is the record of who accessed a resource, when the access occurred, and what activity happened during that session. It is the operational proof that supports audits, investigations, and access reviews when privileged access is shared across teams.

Deepen your knowledge

PAM governance for modern infrastructure access is a core topic in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are mapping privileged access across cloud, Kubernetes, and service workflows, it is worth exploring.

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