Secret Server (originally from Thycotic, now from Delinea since the 2021 Thycotic merger with Centrify) is an enterprise password management application, which is available with either a cloud-based or on-premise deployment which emphasizes fast deployment, scalability, and simplicity.
I would recommend Delinea to any organization or colleague, as I have used it to support our shared services model, as well as a dedicated model for people support to customers, for privileged access management. Delinea has provided us with effective methods for handling unnecessary login attempts to the customer infrastructure. Additionally, the connection thread is available in the audit trail for review, which is a valuable feature to have.
One thing we really like is getting OTPs and payment alerts through messaging bots. Unlike SMS, it’s free for us, secure, and users like it. It’s a way to send codes and notifications without extra costs. These messages are always right there for the user, easy to access on their phone.
Password Management: Its entire purpose, really. Secret Server stores passwords in an incredibly easy to use way. They can be organized in groups, they contain all the information about the site or system the password is used for (including URLs for websites), and even a notes field. You can set up specific policies for expirations and complexity, and Secret Server can even generate strong passwords for you. Using a password is simple, too, since you can just click a button to add it to your clipboard; you don't even have to unmask the password.
Security: The passwords are stored encrypted in a SQL database, and the application requires an authenticated login. This could be local, but we tie it into Active Directory. Each folder of passwords has groups assigned (in our case, again, AD, but you can make them local groups) with different permission levels, so we can compartmentalize passwords. Desktop technicians don't have access to network switch passwords, etc.
Easy Setup: It took me about an hour to get the server running, from spinning up the VM to importing our old password list. It took a little longer to organize the passwords into proper folders, and then assigning groups, but it was easy to do.
Personal Passwords: Each user also gets a personal folder, where they can keep their own, unshared passwords. This is nice for sites or systems with individualized logins (e.g., a firewall, VPN, etc.)
Favorites: Secret Server lets you tag passwords as "favorites" so you can easily find ones you use constantly. The search feature is nice, but this is nicer.
We’ll keep using Protectimus. Been using it for years, no real issues, it just works. Covers what we need, different setups, mgmt, logs, all that. OTP via bots is really handy and saves us money. Support’s fine, they reply when needed. Overall, it does the job, so we’ll keep it.
My rating is purely based on the configurational activities, as feature-wise delineation has all the features that are very beneficial for customers, though the implementation is a bit more manual work, which can be reduced with a low-code platform. Along with that, we can have a better UI to have intuitiveness and can manage the platform for shared customers in a better way. Overall, it is a very good tool for PAM.
I gave 10 points for their solution because the GUI got a fresh update and it’s really easy to use now. The old one had some annoying limitations, but the new layout is much more intuitive. On mobile it works good too. Managing relations between tokens, users, and resources is way smoother now.
There were not very many solutions that provided the entire package of taking an account from creation and deactivating it when no longer needed, as well as providing the discovery of unknown service accounts. Other solutions like RoboForm and LastPass did not offer the ability to manage your service accounts and added layers of complication to ensure security.
We checked a few options before picking Protectimus. We looked at SafeNet Auth Management, Duo, and using Google Authenticator with our own backend. SafeNet felt really old-school — UI looks dated and the system’s kinda tricky to run & maintain. Duo’s solid, but it’s pricey and, more importantly, doesn’t offer full on-prem deployment. We need on-prem to handle auth for our employees on our own infra, so that was a dealbreaker. Google Authenticator is popular & free, but it’s just a client for generating OTPs — all the user mgmt, token handling, and policies would be on us.Protectimus gives all that out of the box. We can manage users & tokens centrally, set auth policies, and support multiple channels. That flexibility made it the best fit for our setup.
