Privilege identity management: what Forrester’s latest ranking means

TL;DR: Forrester’s Q3 2025 PIM evaluation highlights privilege governance, credential and secrets management, and session controls as the criteria shaping modern identity security decisions, according to Delinea’s summary of the report. The broader lesson is that privilege management is now a lifecycle and detection problem, not just an elevation-control problem.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Delinea: Delinea Named a Leader in Q3 2025 Privileged Identity Management Solutions Report by Independent Research Firm

By the numbers:

• Delinea states its platform delivers 99.995% uptime for identity security operations.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams govern privileged access across humans and machine identities?

A: Security teams should use one privilege governance model with actor-specific rules for humans, service accounts, and automation.

Q: Why do credential and secrets controls matter so much in privileged identity management?

A: Because the privilege decision is only meaningful if the credential that enables it is also controlled.

Q: How can organisations tell whether privileged access governance is actually working?

A: They should be able to reconstruct every privileged action from request to session to evidence without relying on manual correlation.

Practitioner guidance

• Re-centre PAM around policy and evidence Review whether privileged access approvals, session recording, and audit evidence are managed as one process or as disconnected controls.
• Unify human and machine privilege governance Inventory where admins, service accounts, automation, and AI-assisted workflows all receive elevated access through different paths.
• Treat secrets and sessions as first-class controls Do not let secrets management sit outside the privilege programme.

What's in the full analysis

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

• The specific Forrester scoring areas where Delinea received top marks, including privilege governance and administration and identity threat detection.
• The source language around centralized authorization, intelligent access workflows, and adaptive controls that informs the vendor's positioning.
• The supporting customer-feedback themes cited in the evaluation, including user experience, onboarding, and policy management.
• The context for Delinea Iris AI and how the platform describes evidence-based access decisions in practice.

👉 Read Delinea’s summary of the Forrester PIM evaluation and AI security positioning →

Privilege identity management: what Forrester’s latest ranking means?

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