Executive Summary

Key Takeaways

Non-human identity management is emerging as a critical cybersecurity discipline as applications, services, workloads, devices and AI agents create machine identities at increasing scale. Traditional IAM and PAM approaches are not designed to address the volume, dynamic lifecycles and autonomous behavior of these identities. Enterprises increasingly require purpose-built platforms that provide continuous discovery, credential management, least-privilege governance and behavioral monitoring across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Non-Human Identity Management evaluates 20 providers. Microsoft, Saviynt and CyberArk ranked highest overall. CyberArk, GitGuardian, Microsoft, Okta, Saviynt, ServiceNow, Teleport and Veeam were rated Exemplary, Akeyless and Astrix Security were Innovative, Omada Identity and P0 Security were Assurance, and the remaining eight providers were Merit.

Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (50%) and Platform (30%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Microsoft, Saviynt and CyberArk achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by capabilities for identity discovery, authentication, authorization, lifecycle management and behavioral monitoring. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied machine identity, cloud-native and automated operating environments.

Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Microsoft, Veeam and Okta were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer commitment and clear dedication to customer needs. Providers with lower performance often lacked sufficient information to demonstrate customer success, articulate commitment to customer experience or communicate measurable value through TCO/ROI.

Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should evaluate NHI management platforms based on the ability to discover and govern machine identities continuously across dynamic environments. Assessment should prioritize identity inventory, short-lived credential support, lifecycle automation, least-privilege policy enforcement, behavioral monitoring and integration with cloud, development and security ecosystems. Organizations should also evaluate support for AI agents and other autonomous identities, where scalable governance, continuous monitoring and clear accountability become increasingly important.

The Findings

The software providers and products evaluated in this research offer product and customer experiences, but not every feature is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to support the relevant business processes and use cases. Moreover, having too many product capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities is important and meets your enterprise’s requirements.

An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes in line with TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is evident throughout the provider’s website, the buying process and the customer journey.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Microsoft atop the list, followed by Saviynt and CyberArk. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Microsoft has done so in five categories, Saviynt in four, CyberArk in three and Omada Identity, Okta and Veeam.