Most privileged access programs were built around a simple idea: Find the admin accounts, lock the credentials in a vault and record what people do with them.
That idea still works, it just doesn’t reach far enough anymore.
Today, most identities that carry privilege aren’t human
Instead, they’re service accounts, automation pipelines and AI agents that run continuously, make their own decisions and already outnumber human users many times over.
Two recent analyst reports recognize that Delinea has answered this change: the 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Privileged Access Management (PAM) and the 2026 Frost Radar for PAM.
Vaulting and session recording still matter; they’re table stakes. The problem is coverage. A vault protects the credentials, and a session recording shows you what happened once access was granted. Neither one tells you whether a specific action, taken by a specific identity, at a specific moment, should have been allowed at all.
When privilege was held almost entirely by human administrators who logged in a few times a day, that gap was manageable. Now an AI agent can take thousands of actions an hour, on its own schedule, long after the person who set it up has logged off. The control has to move closer to the action.
This is the throughline in both reports. KuppingerCole frames the category as moving away from managing accounts and toward governing the actions identities take, because privilege now spans agents, service accounts and workloads rather than a tidy list of admins. Frost & Sullivan makes the same point from the market side. It calls out the ability to govern privileged access at machine and AI speed as the capability that defines today’s market leaders.
If you lead security, the question is shifting from who has access to what an identity is actually allowed to do, in real time, every time. That’s a different control model, and it favors platforms designed for actions, not accounts.
Delinea was built for the action itself, the part a vault never sees. The capabilities both reports emphasize are the ones the Delinea Platform was built around.
You can’t govern what you can’t see. And AI agents are showing up faster than most teams can track. Delinea treats discovery, posture analysis and control as one connected motion rather than three disconnected tools. Every identity, human and machine, lands in a single inventory, gets a risk score and can be governed from the same place. KuppingerCole highlights that continuum as a key differentiator.
This is the heart of it. Delinea authorizes access as an action happens. It can give an AI agent access to a database, server or API without ever issuing it a standing credential. so there’s no secret sitting in the agent for an attacker to take. That’s just-in-time (JIT) access and zero standing privilege (ZSP) at work two areas KuppingerCole named among Delinea's strongest.
Delinea wins because access appears when needed and disappears when not. Delinea Iris AI applies real-time judgment to how that access is granted and audited, so the decision moves at the speed of the work.
Strong controls only help if teams actually deploy them. On its 2026 Radar, Frost & Sullivan named Delinea a Growth and Innovation Leader, citing operational simplicity and implementations that are up and running in weeks. For a lean security team, getting controls working quickly is the ideal security outcome. It’s the difference between a policy on a slide and enforcement in production.
Both reports place PAM inside a bigger picture. Privileged access is converging with identity governance, identity threat detection and response, secrets management and cloud entitlements into a single connected layer. Delinea anchors the privileged-access core of that layer, from securing AI agents and machine identities to controlling server and endpoint privileges across on-premise, cloud and hybrid estates. A program that can see and control every identity in one place is easier to run, and harder for an attacker to slip through.
KuppingerCole named Delinea a Leader in its 2026 Leadership Compass for PAM, across the Overall, Product, Innovation and Market categories. Frost & Sullivan recognized Delinea as a Growth and Innovation Leader on its 2026 Frost Radar for PAM. Two independent firms, using different methods and different evidence, reached the same conclusion. The recognition is significant. What stands behind it means even more: Runtime control across every human, machine and AI identity is where privilege is going, and it’s what Delinea has been building toward.
The Delinea Platform authorizes access for every identity, human and machine, at the moment of action, and keeps the credentials off the user and the agent. See it work in a personalized demo.
Download the 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Privileged Access Management.
Read the 2026 Frost Radar for Privileged Access Management.