CyberArk is over-engineered for managing non-human accounts. The overhead is unjustifiable.
We tracked our team's time spent on credential rotation for service accounts and CI/CD pipelines. CyberArk required:
* 3x more configuration steps per account
* Weekly maintenance alerts that were false positives 70% of the time
* Manual intervention for API-based integrations
Switched to HashiCorp Vault six months ago. Results:
* 40% reduction in time-to-rotate credentials
* Zero false positive alerts after proper setup
* Native Kubernetes and Terraform support eliminated custom scripting
The metrics don't lie. CyberArk's dashboard shows "compliance," but the operational cost is hidden. Vault delivers the actual outcome: automated, reliable secrets management without the bloat.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.