NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Akeyless redefines how organizations manage and protect non-human identities. Machines and AI agents are the backbone of modern enterprises, accessing critical systems, data, and APIs across clouds, SaaS, and on-prem environments. Yet traditional identity and access management tools were built for humans, leaving machines exposed to misconfigured credentials, leaked secrets, and over permissioned access.

Akeyless secures machine identities from the ground up.

Instead of relying on static keys or passwords, Akeyless provides ephemeral, policy driven identities for every machine and AI agent. Credentials are issued just in time, automatically expire, and are bound to precise entitlements. Machines never store secrets, hardcode credentials, or reuse tokens, eliminating the risk of leakage through logs, prompts, or code. Access exists only when it’s needed and disappears when the task ends.

Beyond dynamic credential issuance, Akeyless delivers full machine identity lifecycle management, including automated rotation, certificate issuance and renewal, workload identity federation, and centralized policy enforcement.

Akeyless also addresses the “secret zero” problem, allowing machines to authenticate using native cloud IAM roles, Kubernetes service accounts, or certificate-based trust without ever requiring a bootstrap credential. This removes one of the most common and dangerous attack vectors for machine identities.

Federation and visibility across environments is another key differentiator. Machines operate across hyperscale clouds, SaaS platforms, and on-prem systems often in the same workflow. Akeyless enables identity federation, allowing a machine in AWS to securely access an on-prem database or a SaaS application, while lightweight internal gateways extend secure authentication to legacy systems.

Unlike siloed vault deployments, Akeyless provides Multi-Vault Governance, unifying visibility and policy enforcement across AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes Secrets, and other stores—without migration or duplication. This gives security teams consistent rotation policies, access controls, and audit reporting across all machine identities.
Security is built in at every layer. Akeyless’s zero-knowledge SaaS architecture ensures no single party, including Akeyless itself, ever holds full credentials. Distributed Fragments Cryptography™ (DFC™) protects secrets even in the event of a breach, and hybrid TLS 1.3 with post-quantum ML-KEM768 safeguards machine communications against future threats.

Akeyless secures over 220 billion machine-to-machine interactions annually.

The impact is significant: organizations gain full control, visibility, and auditability over all machine identities, reducing risk, simplifying compliance, and enabling the safe scaling of AI, automation, and cloud operations. Akeyless doesn’t just authenticate machines, it empowers enterprises to manage, govern, and enforce machine access across any environment.