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25/06/2026 12:28 am
TL;DR: Identity security platforms should deliver shared services for audit, lifecycle, correlation, policy, automation, visibility, resilience, and cost efficiency, not just privileged access controls or secret rotation, according to Delinea. The core issue is whether products share one operating layer or remain disconnected tools that force manual work and inconsistent governance.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Delinea: Part 1, How to evaluate an identity security platform, 10 questions that matter
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should teams evaluate whether an identity product is really a platform?
A: Assess whether the vendor provides shared services for audit, lifecycle, policy, correlation, automation, and visibility across multiple products.
Q: Why do separate identity tools create governance problems?
A: Separate tools create policy drift, inconsistent lifecycle handling, and fragmented evidence because each system makes and records decisions differently.
Q: What should security teams require from identity event sharing?
A: Teams should require a common schema, real-time signal exchange, and the ability for multiple products to consume the same identity events.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every identity control to a shared service owner Inventory where audit, policy, lifecycle, correlation, and automation are implemented today.
- Test for lifecycle consistency across products Run a joiner-mover-leaver scenario across vaulting, cloud entitlements, server logins, and privileged sessions.
- Verify open signal exchange before scaling automation Check whether identity events can be shared through standards such as the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 before automating downstream responses.
What's in the full article
Delinea's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How Delinea maps each RFP question to specific platform capabilities and implementation signals
- Examples of the shared-services model across audit, policy, lifecycle, automation, and session visibility
- The vendor's own explanation of how its platform treats identity as a common operating layer
- The second half of the series, which maps the same questions to concrete platform functions and outcomes
👉 Read Delinea's 10 questions for evaluating identity security platform strength →
Identity security platforms: what separates a platform from point tools?
Explore further
25/06/2026 9:23 am
Shared services are the real test of identity platform maturity. A product stack becomes a platform only when audit, lifecycle, policy, correlation, and automation operate as common services rather than separate feature sets. That architecture matters because security teams do not manage isolated events, they manage identity behaviour across humans, workloads, secrets, and AI-connected systems. Practitioners should evaluate whether the vendor reduces operational fragmentation or simply repackages it.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, 38% have no or low visibility, and a further 47% have only partial visibility, according to the State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- That visibility gap matters because 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, according to the 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When does automation improve identity governance and when does it make things worse?
A: Automation helps when it inherits centralized policy and audit context from the platform layer. It makes governance worse when each product automates locally, because exceptions multiply and accountability becomes harder to trace. The test is whether the automation is observable, reversible, and governed once rather than many times.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity security platforms need shared services, not siloed tools
