- Go to the KuppingerCole Booking tool webpage.
- Under Select a Service, select Leadership Compass Briefing 45 mins.
- Under Select Staff, scroll down and select Nitish Deshpande
- Choose date and time between Nov 2, 2026 - Nov 27, 2026 that are convenient for your team.
- You will receive an MS Teams invite
- Please prepare a slide deck and provide it to the analyst
Recommended briefing outline
Please observe the scope boundaries of this Leadership Compass. The evaluation focuses on the discovery, management, protection, governance, and lifecycle of non-human identities (NHIs) and their associated credentials, privileges, and trust relationships. Adjacent capabilities such as general workforce IAM, generic PAM, standalone secrets management, PKI, CIEM, API security, or application security may contribute to the solution, but should be discussed primarily where they directly support NHIM.
Product-centric discussion is essential. The briefing should concentrate on what your solution does, how it is implemented, how it integrates into enterprise environments, and how customers operate it at scale.
A live or guided demo is strongly expected. We expect the majority of the technical discussion to be demonstrated in the product wherever practical. Slides should establish context; the demo should provide the evidence.
Please do not spend time on:
- Generic introductions to identity security, Zero Trust, or why NHIM matters
- High-level vision presentations without technical or operational depth
- Extended discussion of adjacent capabilities that are outside the scope of this Leadership Compass
Briefing Structure
1. Company and Product Context
- Brief company overview, including relevant facts and figures, geographic focus, and market positioning
- Partner and technology ecosystem relevant to NHIM
- Primary customer profiles, typical deployment scale, and representative environments
2. Product Architecture and Enterprise Readiness
Please address these topics concisely and, wherever possible, demonstrate them as part of the product walkthrough rather than through extensive architecture slides.
- Supported deployment models, including SaaS, self-managed, hybrid, cloud, and on-premises environments
- Level of feature parity between different models
- Scalability characteristics and support for large, heterogeneous enterprise estates
- APIs, SDKs, automation interfaces, and extensibility
- Integration with identity, security, cloud, DevOps, PKI, secrets management, and IT service management ecosystems
- Approaches for supporting legacy systems, applications, and infrastructure
- Data residency, tenancy, availability, and operational resilience considerations
3. Core Capabilities
Please structure the product discussion and demonstration around the evaluation categories below. We do not expect every solution to provide equal depth across all categories. Concentrate on capabilities you genuinely support and clearly distinguish between functionality delivered natively, through another product in your portfolio, or through a partner.
- NHI Discovery, Inventory, Ownership, and Lifecycle Management: Continuous discovery and classification across cloud, SaaS, infrastructure, applications, DevOps, and on-premises environments; shadow and orphaned NHI detection; ownership attribution; lifecycle management; and relationship mapping across identities, credentials, resources, and owners.
- Workload Identity, Federation, and Authentication: Short-lived and ephemeral workload identities; secretless authentication; federation and attestation; dynamic credential issuance; and interoperability across cloud, Kubernetes, applications, and hybrid environments.
- Credential, Certificate Lifecycle Management: Discovery and lifecycle management of secrets, keys, tokens, certificates, and other credentials; automated issuance, rotation, renewal, expiry, and revocation; and governance of trust relationships and compromised credentials.
- Authorization, Entitlements, and Privilege Governance: NHI permission and entitlement visibility; least-privilege controls; excessive privilege detection; Just-in-Time and Zero Standing Privilege; and contextual or continuous authorization.
- AI Agent Identity Registry Management: Agent discovery, identity, lifecycle, and ownership; and entitlement management.
- DevOps and CI/CD Integration: Integration with development and deployment workflows; NHI and credential detection; pipeline policy enforcement; workload identity provisioning; secrets reduction; and developer remediation workflows.
- Governance, Audit, Reporting, and Compliance: Policy and ownership governance; access reviews; audit trails and evidence generation; lifecycle and activity reporting; integrations with security and governance platforms; and compliance support.
- Automation, Analytics, and Innovative Capabilities: Policy-driven automation and remediation; analytics and prioritization; identity graph analysis; intelligent recommendations; third-party orchestration; and other innovative NHI management capabilities. Runtime identity containment, including credential and token revocation, session termination and entitlement withdrawal for compromised or misbehaving NHIs and agents. Risk scoring, behavioral analytics, and anomaly detection; detection of credential or privilege misuse; attack-path and blast-radius analysis; investigation; and automated or guided remediation.
4. Demonstration (Mandatory, approximately 25 minutes)
We would particularly like to see:
- Discovery of NHIs across a realistic heterogeneous enterprise environment, including how a previously unknown, unmanaged, or orphaned identity is identified
- Inventory, classification, ownership, and relationship mapping for an NHI
- The lifecycle of an NHI from creation or discovery through modification, use, and eventual decommissioning
- Identification and remediation of a long-lived credential, secret, certificate, or other credential-related risk
- A workload identity, short-lived credential, federation, attestation, or secretless authentication workflow
- Identification of excessive privileges or entitlements and the path toward least privilege, Just-in-Time access, or Zero Standing Privilege
- Risk prioritization showing the relationship between an identity, its credentials, privileges, accessible resources, and potential blast radius
- Detection or investigation of suspicious NHI activity and the corresponding response or remediation workflow
- An AI agent identity scenario where supported
- Integration with a DevOps, CI/CD, cloud, identity, security, or IT operations workflow
- Governance, audit, and reporting workflows, including the evidence available to an identity, security, or compliance reviewer
- Automation at scale, including policy-driven or bulk remediation where supported
5. Differentiation and Roadmap
- Clear articulation of what differentiates your platform from other NHI management solutions and adjacent identity security products
- Near-term roadmap priorities relevant to NHI management
- Known limitations, dependencies, or architectural trade-offs; openness is appreciated and expected
6. Wrap-Up and Q&A If Time Permits
Final Notes: Stating clearly where your solution does not compete is more useful than claiming comprehensive coverage that cannot be demonstrated. Where functionality depends on another product in your portfolio, a third-party integration, professional services, or functionality that is not yet generally available, please identify this explicitly.
