Topic starter
04/07/2026 5:05 pm
TL;DR: Akeyless says two KuppingerCole Leadership Compass reports point to a convergence between secrets management and non-human identity management as enterprises secure machine identities, certificates, keys, and privileged access through one control plane. The boundary between credential storage and identity governance is collapsing, so lifecycle control becomes the deciding factor.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Akeyless: “What KuppingerCole Reveals About the Convergence of Secrets Management and NHIM Security”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when secret managers are treated as the whole NHI programme?
A: The programme loses sight of identities that are created, stored, or consumed outside the vault, including cloud roles, Kubernetes secrets, and CI variables.
Q: When should IAM teams prioritise unified control over secrets, certificates, and machine identities?
A: They should prioritise it when the same workloads, pipelines, or services depend on multiple credential types and are changing faster than manual review can keep up.
Q: How do teams know if machine identity governance is actually working?
A: Look for evidence that each service account has a current owner, a narrow purpose, a short credential lifetime, and a clear retirement path.
Practitioner guidance
- Map the machine identity estate Build a single inventory of service accounts, application identities, API keys, certificates, and tokens, then assign ownership and business purpose for each.
- Unify rotation and revocation workflows Tie secret rotation, certificate renewal, and key revocation to the same lifecycle events so stale credentials cannot survive a workload change or offboarding event.
- Audit runtime credential use Trace where credentials are consumed in CI/CD, cloud workloads, containers, and AI-driven workflows so governance reflects actual execution paths.
Bottom line: The article shows that secrets management and NHI governance are converging into one operational discipline for machine identities.
What's in the full article
Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- KuppingerCole recognition details across the Enterprise Secrets Management and Non-Human Identity Management reports
- The vendor's description of its unified control plane for secrets, certificates, keys, and privileged access
- Architectural claims around Distributed Fragments Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge storage
- The article's discussion of how AI-driven systems change machine identity governance requirements
👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of secrets and NHI convergence →
Explore further
View Full Forum → | NHI Foundation Course → | Our Services → | Read the full analysis →
04/07/2026 5:06 pm
Secrets and NHI are now one governance problem: The article reflects a structural change in identity security, not just a category overlap. When machine identities depend on secrets, certificates, and keys to operate, the credential lifecycle becomes part of identity governance rather than a separate storage problem. Practitioners should stop designing separate control planes for assets that fail together.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Organisations maintain an average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances, creating fragmentation that undermines centralised control, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Enterprises manage far more machine secrets than human ones: 20 times as many according to Enterprise Strategy Group, and 45 times according to GitGuardian.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should security teams govern AI-assisted work that inherits human credentials?
A: Treat it as a delegated identity path, not a simple user session. Security teams should map the human, service account, and agent involved, then monitor the sequence of actions, the tools used, and the systems reached. That lets teams detect when authorised activity drifts into a higher-risk behavioural pattern before containment becomes impossible.
👉 Read our full editorial: Secrets and NHI convergence is reshaping identity security