Consolidating identity, secrets and privileged access onto one platform

Most organizations assemble their security stack one problem at a time. An identity provider for single sign-on and MFA. A secrets manager for credentials and keys. A privileged access management (PAM) product for servers and databases. Later, an EDR agent, a cloud posture scanner, a SIEM.

Each purchase made sense. Together they leave a familiar set of problems.

What fragmentation costs

Three identities for one person. The IdP knows who an engineer is. The secrets manager and the PAM tool each have their own idea, synchronized on a schedule or by hand. When someone leaves, removing access means removing it in every system, and any gap is an account that still works.

Audit trails that do not join up. “Who accessed the production database on Tuesday, using which credential, approved by whom?” spans the IdP’s sign-in log, the PAM session record and the secrets manager’s lease log. Answering it means exporting three logs and correlating them by timestamp.

Policies defined three times. MFA requirements, session lengths and approval rules are configured separately in each product, and drift apart.

Integration work that never ends. Every pair of products needs a connector, and every upgrade can break one.

Spend that compounds. Separate per-seat or per-host licences for overlapping populations, plus the engineering time spent keeping them in sync.

What a consolidated platform changes

When identity, secrets and privileged access share one platform:

• One identity. The person who signs in is the same principal who requests a just-in-time database credential and opens a recorded session. Deprovisioning is one action.
• One audit log. Sign-in, credential issue and session activity are events in the same record, in the same format, ready to export to your SIEM.
• One policy model. MFA, approvals and session rules are defined once and applied across every kind of access.
• Fewer moving parts. No connectors between products you own, and one upgrade path.

What to check before consolidating

Consolidation only helps if each part is good enough on its own. Ask of any platform:

1. Standards, both directions. Can it act as a SAML and OpenID Connect identity provider and federate to existing ones? Does it provision users with SCIM? Can you migrate gradually rather than in one weekend?
2. Phishing-resistant MFA. Passkeys, WebAuthn hardware keys and, for government work, smart cards.
3. Secrets primitives. Static secrets, dynamic short-lived database credentials, encryption as a service, an internal certificate authority, SSH key management and a way to deliver secrets to Kubernetes workloads.
4. Privileged sessions. Just-in-time approval, MFA at the start of every session, and recording you can replay.
5. Exportable, tamper-evident logs. In an open format, so leaving the platform does not mean losing your history.
6. Where it runs. Hosted, in your own cluster, or fully air-gapped, depending on your regulatory boundary.
7. Honest compliance status. Which attestations and authorizations exist today, and which are plans. A platform designed to support a framework is not the same as one assessed against it.

The Tessarac Security Platform

The Tessarac Security Platform brings identity, secrets, privileged access, endpoint security, cloud security posture and an AI-empowered SOC into one deployable platform, designed to run from a lab environment to an air-gapped enclave. It is in beta: the product pages describe the platform being built, and design partners get a direct line to the engineering team and a voice in what ships first. Compliance status, including what is on the roadmap and not yet started, is published on the Trust Center.

If you are evaluating a specific replacement, the comparisons with Okta and HashiCorp Vault go into detail.