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17/05/2026 9:21 am
TL;DR: A UserEvidence study of more than 200 Delinea Platform customers reports about $2.2M in average annual ROI, $2.1M in incident-prevention savings, and 2,236 hours saved per year, framing platform expansion as an operational and governance question rather than a pure migration story, according to Delinea. The hard issue for NHI teams is whether those gains come from better control design or simply from tool consolidation.
NHIMG editorial — here’s why we think this discussion matters
By the numbers:
- The research reports an average annual ROI of about $2.2M across more than 200 Delinea Platform customers.
- Customers reported 2,236 hours saved per year.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should teams evaluate ROI claims for NHI and privileged access platforms?
A: Treat ROI as a starting hypothesis, not proof.
Q: Should organisations consolidate secret management and privileged access into one platform?
A: Sometimes, but only if consolidation improves ownership, auditability, and lifecycle control rather than just reducing tool count.
Q: Why do NHI programmes struggle to show value in board terms?
A: Because the value is often split across different outcomes that are tracked separately.
Practitioner guidance
- Separate security ROI from labor ROI Build a scorecard that tracks incident prevention, manual hours removed, and reduction in standing access as distinct metrics.
- Audit ownership for every non-human identity Require a named owner, purpose, and review cadence for each service account, token, or certificate before migration or expansion.
- Measure standing privilege before and after platform changes Compare persistent access counts, approval paths, and credential lifetime across the current and target states.
The practical programme shift is to treat every NHI as part of a managed lifecycle, not a static asset, and to measure whether the lifecycle is actually shortening the time identities remain exposed?
👉 Register for Delinea's webinar on platform ROI for NHI and identity security →
Explore further
17/05/2026 9:22 am
Platform ROI is not the same as identity security maturity. Savings claims often reflect workflow compression, not reduced attack opportunity. A team can save hours and still carry the same unmanaged service accounts, stale secrets, or excess privileges if governance does not change with the tooling. Practitioners should treat ROI as a procurement input, not a proxy for control quality.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret is 27 days, despite 75% of organisations expressing strong confidence in their secrets management capabilities, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a measurable behaviour gap, according to the same research.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between tool consolidation and governance improvement?
A: Tool consolidation reduces the number of systems teams use, while governance improvement reduces unmanaged access, unclear ownership, and persistent privilege. A single platform can do both, but it is also possible to centralise weak processes. The difference is visible in whether risk actually drops after the change.
👉 Read our full editorial: Delinea Platform webinar: what customer ROI data means for NHI control
