Delinea’s simultaneous recognition as a leader in both the Frost Radar for PAM and the Info-Tech Research Group Data Quadrant Report provides a useful signal about where the privileged access management market is heading — and what organisations should look for when evaluating PAM platforms in 2026.
Dual recognition from independent analyst firms is rare, and it reflects more than just product maturity. Frost & Sullivan’s evaluation focuses on growth strategy and innovation, while Info-Tech’s Data Quadrant is driven by user reviews and implementation experience. When a vendor leads in both, it suggests alignment between product vision and customer reality — something that has been notably absent in the PAM market for years.
The PAM market has been in flux. Legacy PAM solutions built for on-premises infrastructure have struggled to adapt to cloud, containers, and ephemeral workloads. Newer entrants have offered cloud-native approaches but often lack the depth of integration and maturity that enterprise deployments require. Delinea’s recognition in both rankings suggests that the market is rewarding platforms that can bridge both worlds — traditional privileged account management and modern, cloud-native PAM.
For organisations evaluating PAM platforms, the dual leadership signal points to several evaluation criteria that matter more in 2026 than they did previously. First, integration breadth: the ability to connect PAM to cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and identity governance platforms. Second, AI agent readiness: as AI agents receive privileged credentials to execute tasks autonomously, PAM platforms must be able to discover, govern, and monitor these non-human privileged identities. Third, implementation experience: how quickly can the platform be deployed and how effectively does it integrate with existing security tooling.
The broader market implication is that PAM is consolidating around fewer, more capable platforms. Organisations no longer want separate tools for credential vaulting, session management, secrets management, and cloud PAM. They want integrated platforms that cover the full privileged access lifecycle across hybrid environments.
For security leaders, the takeaway is that PAM platform decisions should weigh analyst recognition but also evaluate specific capabilities against your identity landscape — particularly as non-human identities and AI agents create new privileged access patterns that legacy PAM tools were never designed to handle.