The way enterprises think about privilege is changing, and the 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Privileged Access Management (PAM), authored by analyst Alejandro Leal, clearly captures that change.
The report opens by redefining privilege itself. It is no longer the property of a small set of administrative accounts. Now, it is the ability of any identity to perform actions that affect systems, security controls, and other identities. As Leal writes, privilege is “defined less by who holds a specific account and more by what an identity is capable of doing within an environment.”
We are proud that KuppingerCole named Delinea a Leader in the 2026 Leadership Compass for Privileged Access Management, recognized in the Overall, Innovation, and Market Leadership categories. The recognition matters, but what matters more is why: Delinea is closely aligned with where the report says the entire market is heading.
.jpg?width=750&height=579&name=delinea-image-blog-in-post-kuppcole-report%20(1).jpg)
The shift from accounts to actions
The central finding of the report is that PAM is moving “toward controlling actions rather than managing accounts.” The reason is structural. Privilege now extends to AI agents, service accounts, automation pipelines, and workloads that run continuously and often outnumber human users.
These identities usually hold legitimate, inherited permissions, which is why Leal concludes that dynamic, context-based enforcement at the point of action is far more important than authentication alone.
Delinea has built toward exactly that assumption. The report highlights a particularly relevant differentiator from Delinea: our approach to treating discovery, posture analysis, and control as part of a single continuum. The platform treats those as a single connected motion and functions as a security team that closes the gap between identifying a privileged path and controlling it.
Just-in-time: Why privilege now lives everywhere
The market has spent years anchored to credential vaulting and session monitoring. Those controls still matter, but they cover only part of the privileged activity in a modern enterprise. The report clearly states that just-in-time access is one of Delinea’s strongest areas, and notes that it reaches databases, Kubernetes environments, and cloud consoles alongside traditional server infrastructure, with policy-based approvals and integration into the systems teams already use.
What differentiates Delinea is its ability to bridge traditional and modern environments within a single platform. Many vendors in the report are still foundational and vault-centric. A newer group in the market is strong in cloud-native access but does not span legacy and hybrid estates. The Delinea Platform covers both ends, supporting secretless, ephemeral, and zero standing privilege models while maintaining governance over existing and cloud-native vaults.
KuppingerCole credits the platform with facilitating the move from full admin accounts toward least privilege and zero standing privilege, without forcing customers to fragment how they administer it.
How AI agents adhere to privilege without handing over credentials
This report makes it clear that AI agents represent a substantial and growing share of privileged activity and typically act with the credentials and permissions they inherit. That makes the credential itself the exposure.
Leal describes how Delinea “provides access for AI agents to private resources without granting credentials to those agents.” That capability is what sets the platform apart. An agent can reach the database, server, or API it needs without ever holding credentials, so there is no standing secret for an attacker to capture and no path for the agent to circumvent policy. Authorization occurs at the moment the action is attempted, which is precisely the level of control the report argues the market now requires.
PAM as an identity security control plane
KuppingerCole frames PAM as part of a broader identity security fabric. PAM is no longer a standalone domain that converges with governance, threat detection, secrets management, and cloud entitlement controls. The report describes Delinea’s recent work as a vendor “trying to widen PAM into a broader identity security control plane without losing sight of their core competencies.”
The result is a platform that extends well beyond traditional PAM. Continuous identity discovery (CID) feeds posture and threat analysis. Identity threat protection and cloud entitlement management sit alongside server and workstation privilege control, with endpoint privilege management across Windows, Linux, and macOS. The report also notes that Delinea’s use of AI is “more concrete than cosmetic,” citing session review, contextual authorization, and natural-language exploration of the identity graph as practical rather than decorative.
The takeaway
The 2026 Leadership Compass describes a market leaving behind the era when securing privilege meant locking up a handful of administrator passwords.
Privilege has become a fast-moving capability distributed across people, machines, and AI agents, and it must be governed in real time. Delinea’s recognition as a Leader reflects a platform built for exactly that reality, providing organizations with the visibility, posture and control needed to manage privilege across every identity, environment, and execution path.
To read the full independent analysis and see why KuppingerCole named Delinea a Leader, download your copy of the 2026 Leadership Compass 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.
