The PAM Consolidation Play: Keeper Security Targets the Enterprise Where CyberArk Left Pain Behind

Two years ago, Keeper Security occupied a well-defined but somewhat modest corner of the privileged access management market — a capable password management platform with PAM-adjacent capabilities that competitors and analysts alike quietly labeled “PAM-lite.”

That characterization no longer applies as Keeper arrived at RSAC 2026 as a full-stack PAM platform serving 90,000 business customers across 150 countries, freshly credentialed with FedRAMP High and GovRAMP High certifications, and carrying a product architecture that has fundamentally transformed from the ground up. The company’s trajectory from consumer password manager to enterprise PAM contender tells an important story about how the identity security market is being reshaped by AI, non-human identity proliferation, and the accelerating cost of complexity.

Eleven PAM Solutions at One Agency: The Tool-Sprawl Crisis Is Real

The core problem Keeper addresses is not a technology gap — it is a governance gap created by decades of accumulating point solutions. Security leaders already know the symptoms: organizations running 50 to 100 disparate security products, often with multiple redundant PAM solutions in parallel. Keeper’s team described a government agency managing 11 separate PAM platforms simultaneously, a scenario that is simultaneously absurd and entirely believable to anyone who has navigated enterprise security procurement over the past decade. This fragmentation destroys visibility, multiplies administrative overhead, and creates the kind of seam-riddled environments that attackers actively exploit.

Underneath the tool-sprawl problem sits an even more fundamental one: credential exposure continues to drive more than 68% of breaches. Human credential mismanagement remains the dominant attack vector, but the emergence of non-human identities — service accounts, API keys, AI agent credentials — has expanded the attack surface dramatically and largely without sufficient governance.

Enterprises are deploying AI agents and hooking them directly into critical infrastructure while NHI management remains, at most organizations, a largely manual and deeply inconsistent afterthought. Persistent over-provisioning compounds the exposure: IT administrators, under perpetual pressure to keep operations running, default to granting excessive access rather than risk a 3 a.m. call from an executive locked out of a critical system.

One Vault, Every Identity: The Architecture Competitors Can’t Easily Copy

Keeper’s architectural answer to this complexity is consolidation through a unified, vault-centric platform. Every capability — password management, secrets management, database access, zero trust network access, remote browser isolation, just-in-time provisioning, and endpoint privilege management — operates from a single interface built on a zero-knowledge architecture that Keeper has held since its founding.

KeeperDB, the platform’s newly launched database management capability, illustrates the practical value. Supporting eleven database types across a natural language interface, it gives non-technical users — line-of-business leaders, compliance officers, operations managers — direct, credentialed, session-recorded access to query databases without requiring SQL expertise or an engineering intermediary. Every session injects credentials automatically, records screen and keyboard activity, and maintains a full audit trail. For organizations grappling with the access-democratization challenge that AI tools are accelerating, this capability closes a meaningful gap.

The MCP integration for agentic AI extends Keeper’s governance posture directly into AI workflows. Through a running MCP server, AI agents operate on vault-stored secrets with human-in-the-loop permission controls — each action requires explicit approval before execution, maintaining the kind of human oversight that responsible AI deployment demands. The AI-powered session monitoring layer adds a behavioral detection capability that terminates sessions exhibiting high-risk command patterns in real time, informed by the LLM provider of the organization’s choosing, with configurable aggressiveness thresholds and manual override rules. Just-in-time provisioning with ephemeral account creation and automated destruction rounds out the zero-standing-privilege model.

What to Know Before You Deploy

Keeper deploys through a gateway model — lightweight instances running on Windows, Linux, or containerized environments that communicate outbound over port 443 through TLS-encrypted tunnels, eliminating the need to open inbound security system rules. Load balancing and automatic failover are built in.

For organizations migrating from legacy PAM platforms, the consolidation journey itself represents the primary complexity: rationalizing entitlements, decommissioning redundant tools, and retraining administrators who have spent years inside platforms like CyberArk. The AI session monitoring capability, currently covering SSH sessions, is expanding to RDP, remote browser isolation, and database connections, and teams evaluating the platform today should factor that roadmap into their deployment planning rather than treating current coverage as the final state.

Why This Matters

The enterprise security market is drowning in PAM proliferation at precisely the moment when the identity threat surface is expanding fastest. NHIs are multiplying faster than organizations can govern them, AI agents are acquiring access to critical systems with minimal oversight, and the human tendency to over-provision rather than over-restrict continues to leave standing privilege exposed across the enterprise.

Keeper’s platform — unified, zero-knowledge by design, and increasingly AI-native — addresses all three dimensions from a single architecture. Security teams evaluating their PAM strategy, particularly those already frustrated with the operational burden of incumbent platforms, have strong reason to put Keeper through a formal evaluation. The combination of enterprise-grade depth and an accessibility model designed for every user in the organization, not just IT administrators, positions Keeper as a genuinely differentiated option in a market that has long rewarded complexity over usability.