Thales Named an Overall Leader in 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Enterprise Secrets Management

We’re proud to share that Thales has been recognized as an Overall Leader in the 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Enterprise Secrets Management. This prestigious ranking highlights our strength across three critical areas: product capabilities, innovation, and market presence.

Tackling the Rising Challenge of Secrets Sprawl

As organizations increasingly rely on DevOps tools, cloud-native applications, and distributed systems, managing secrets like credentials, API keys, certificates, and tokens has become more complex — and more critical. According to the 2024 Thales Data Threat Report report, 61% cited secrets management as a top DevOps challenge. This lack of visibility leads to “secrets sprawl,” significantly increasing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.

In modern IT environments, every service, tool, and machine identity introduce more secrets that need to be securely managed. Without a centralized, scalable approach, organizations are left vulnerable to attack vectors that exploit unmanaged or orphaned secrets.

Why KuppingerCole Recognized Thales as an Overall Leader

In its 2025 report, KuppingerCole noted the growing need for comprehensive secrets management due to:

“The increasing complexity of IT environments, the proliferation of machine identities, and the critical need to secure DevOps pipelines, cloud-native applications, and industrial IoT (IIoT) deployments.”

Thales was evaluated against strict criteria, including the ability to manage secrets across their full lifecycle, support for various identity types, scalability, integration ease, and governance strength.

Key strengths that set Thales apart include:

• Best-in-class secrets and key management
• Distributed Fragments Cryptography™ (via Akeyless) for enhanced security
• Robust multi-cloud integration
• Advanced audit and governance capabilities
• Robust hardware security module (HSM) integration
• Scalable, flexible deployment models
• Wide partner and customer ecosystem
• Streamlined compliance and monitoring tools

Thales CipherTrust Secrets Management: Securing the Future

At the heart of this recognition is CipherTrust Secrets Management powered by Akeyless (CSM). CSM automates and protects access to mission-critical secrets across DevOps tools and cloud environments. It extends the CipherTrust Data Security Platform with a centralized, scalable way to:

• Create, store, rotate, and remove secrets automatically
• Enforce consistent security policies across your organization
• Support hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with SaaS scalability
• Simplify DevSecOps with easy-to-use automation tools

With CSM, security and governance teams can gain full visibility and control over secrets, helping reduce human error and streamline compliance.

Learn More

To explore the full analysis and see why Thales was named an overall leader, download the full 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Enterprise Secrets Management for Humans, Workloads, and Things, and for further background, join our webinar entitled A Comprehensive Guide to Protecting Secrets and APIs.