Topic starter
25/06/2026 5:14 pm
TL;DR: Akeyless shows that splitting secrets management, privileged access, and certificate lifecycle across separate tools creates glue work, policy drift, and fragmented audit evidence, even when each tool handles its own narrow task. The real failure is treating credential, access, and certificate governance as separate systems rather than one lifecycle.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Akeyless: “Why Teams Pick Akeyless Over CyberArk: Unified Secrets + Modern PAM + CLM”.
Key questions
Q: Where does fragmented identity control fail in practice?
A: It fails when separate tools manage secrets, privileged access, and certificates with different policy models and audit paths.
Q: Why do separate secrets, PAM, and certificate tools increase governance risk?
A: Because each tool can enforce a different lifecycle for the same trust boundary.
Q: How do security teams know whether identity control is actually unified?
A: A good test is whether they can trace a secret request, a certificate issuance, and a privileged session through one audit model without manual reconciliation.
Practitioner guidance
- Map the full credential lifecycle Inventory where secrets, privileged sessions, and certificates are created, rotated, revoked, and logged so you can see which identities cross multiple control planes.
- Reduce policy drift across tools Align issuance, expiry, and revocation rules for database secrets, remote access, and TLS certificates so exceptions do not diverge by product.
- Unify audit evidence for identity events Require one correlation path for secret requests, certificate issuance, and privileged sessions so investigations do not depend on manual log stitching.
Bottom line: Fragmented identity control creates a governance gap because the same trust boundary is enforced by different products with different policy models.
What's in the full article
Akeyless' full post covers the product-level comparison and walkthrough detail this analysis intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step demo of dynamic secret issuance and revocation for a Postgres database
- Certificate chain creation and provisioning flow, including root, intermediate, and leaf handling
- Secure remote access workflow for human users without VPN or shared SSH keys
- Unified audit trail walkthrough showing secret requests, certificate issuance, and session records
👉 Read Akeyless' comparison of fragmented identity control across secrets, access, and certificates →
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25/06/2026 5:49 pm
Fragmented identity control is a governance problem before it is a tooling problem. When secrets, privileged access, and certificate lifecycle are managed in separate products, the organisation is effectively accepting three policy models for the same trust boundary. That creates inconsistent enforcement, duplicated admin work, and gaps in accountability when an identity event crosses tool boundaries. The practitioner conclusion is simple: the control boundary must be designed around the lifecycle, not the product stack.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 73% of vaults are misconfigured, leading to unauthorised access and exposure of sensitive data, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should organisations do when access and certificate governance are split across vendors?
A: They should reassess whether the split is creating avoidable operational overhead and blind spots in revocation, logging, and policy consistency. If the answer is yes, the governance priority is to reduce the number of separate control planes, not to add more exception handling.
👉 Read our full editorial: Akeyless and CyberArk show the cost of fragmented identity control