Privileged access is changing faster than at any point in the category’s history, and the 2026 Frost Radar for Privileged Access Management (PAM) maps that change in detail. Frost & Sullivan describes a market moving past credential vaulting toward a policy-driven control plane that enforces privilege decisions “at the point of use or in real time.”
We are proud that Frost & Sullivan named Delinea a Growth and Innovation leader on the 2026 Frost Radar, and the reasons align closely with where the market is headed.
Privilege is moving to machine speed
The report is clear about what is driving the shift. Hybrid and multi-cloud estates, DevOps pipelines, automation and AI-driven systems have multiplied the number of privileged identities across human users, machines, workloads, third parties, and emerging AI agents. Non-human identities now redefine the landscape of privilege, and agentic AI introduces autonomous actors that execute privileged actions at machine speed.
What that shift means in practice is that the number of identities able to take a privileged action now far outpaces what periodic reviews and static vaults were built to govern. The takeaway from the analysis is that legacy, vault-centric models built for static environments have reached their limits.
A Growth and Innovation leader
Delinea is positioned among the leaders on both axes of the Frost Radar. The report states that “Delinea stands out as a Growth and Innovation leader on the Frost Radar,” citing revenue momentum that outpaced the overall market growth in 2025, while adding market share. That standing reflects both how the platform is built and how quickly customers can put it to work.
Built for simplicity and time-to-value
Frost & Sullivan traces Delinea’s position back to a deliberate choice. As the report puts it, “what initially set Delinea apart was its commitment to consolidating core PAM functions into a unified platform when organizations were seeking simplification and faster deployment.” That shows up in the field as deployments that the report measures “in weeks rather than months,” backed by an integration ecosystem of “over 600 prebuilt integrations across more than 145 vendors.”
The report also notes that many large incumbent PAM vendors face friction as complexity increases with scale, which is the gap Delinea’s ease of administration is built to close.
From assistive AI to continuous control
The report is direct that Delinea’s use of AI is operational rather than cosmetic. It describes a change in how privilege is controlled. “Delinea’s investment in AI has shifted from assistive analytics to continuous, intelligence-driven privilege control.” That shift is already running in the platform. Iris Audit analyzes privileged session recordings in near real time, detecting elevated commands, failed authorizations, and risky behaviors so security teams can identify threats before the next scheduled audit cycle.
Toward runtime authorization for agents and machines
Frost & Sullivan frames the next phase of PAM around enforcement at execution time. Including the ability to anticipate, interrupt, and constrain privilege misuse as it happens. The Delinea Platform is moving in exactly that direction, extending runtime authorization to deliver real-time governance of privileged actions taken by AI agents and non-human identities.
The report flags strong alignment with the megatrends that define this phase, including continuous discovery, zero standing privilege (ZSP), ephemeral and just-in-time (JIT) access, agentic AI access governance, and cloud infrastructure entitlement management.
The 2026 Frost Radar describes a market leaving behind static, compliance-driven controls for continuous, identity-centric privilege governance across humans, machines, and AI agents. Delinea’s recognition as a Growth and Innovation leader reflects a platform that pairs the breadth enterprises need with the simplicity and speed they have come to expect.
To read the full independent analysis and see why Frost & Sullivan named Delinea a Growth and Innovation leader, download your copy of the 2026 Frost Radar for Privileged Access Management.
For more on the announcement and what this recognition means for Delinea and its customers, read the full press release here.
