RankEZ Recognized in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Privileged Access Management in China

RankEZ has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for Privileged Access Management in China (May 2026). We believe this recognition reflects RankEZ’s role in helping organisations modernise privileged access security in China: moving beyond traditional bastion host legacy controls towards enforceable, auditable, least-privilege outcomes.

Gartner notes that “Privileged access serves as prime targets for attackers and represents a significant cybersecurity risk for every organization.” RankEZ is built around that reality: privileged access is not an IT operations detail, it is one of the most sensitive control planes in the enterprise.

RankEZ helps enterprises close the gaps in control, auditability and least privilege access. In China, many organisations have historically standardised on secure maintenance bastion hosts (SMBH) to satisfy operational auditing expectations. Those tools remain useful, but Gartner is clear that “Privileged access management (PAM) is frequently confused with the secure maintenance bastion host (SMBH) in China”. It also observes that “While SMBH offers good session management and is widely adopted due to local compliance requirements, it falls short of achieving the broader protection and business enablement goals of PAM.”

We believe RankEZ was built for the gap Gartner describes: not just observing privileged activity, but controlling it with policy, precision, and accountability; across administrators, endpoints, servers, databases, and third-party access paths.

The RankEZ differentiation: host-based PEDM

In our opinion, the Market Guide highlights a key weakness in how privilege elevation is commonly enforced in the local market: many solutions rely on gateway controls and protocol filtering that can be bypassed. RankEZ takes a different approach by bringing privilege control closer to where actions actually execute the operating system.

Gartner specifically calls out this capability gap and names RankEZ in the context of closing it: "Host-based privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM)… is uncommon among local vendors."

In practice, RankEZ uses host-based privilege control to help organisations reduce standing privilege and tighten administrative blast radius without forcing IT teams into slow, ticket-heavy workflows.

Customer benefits of using RankEZ: RankEZ is designed to help security and infrastructure teams operationalise least privilege in day-to-day IT work:

1) Remove standing admin paths (without breaking operations)
RankEZ supports controlled, time-bound elevation so engineers can perform approved tasks without living permanently as local administrators.

2) Reduce “leaver risk” in privileged access
RankEZ helps teams ensure that privileged access does not outlive employment or vendor engagements by bringing privileged identities and elevation paths under central governance and audit.

3) Produce evidence for auditors without turning security into an operational burden
RankEZ strengthens session and activity accountability so security teams can answer the questions auditors and incident responders actually ask: who accessed what, when, and what actions were performed.

For enterprises operating in China and regionally

Gartner also notes that “local vendors will be more familiar with local regulatory requirements regarding privileged access and privilege credential data localization to help you better address regulatory challenges.” RankEZ is built with those deployment realities in mind, supporting adoption patterns common in regulated and mission-critical environments, where on-premises and private cloud footprints remain significant.

Looking ahead: privileged access is expanding beyond humans

The Market Guide points to increasing pressure from machine identities and AI agents, and recommends to “avoid fragmented machine PAM practices by prioritizing solutions that support open standards (such as SPIFFE/SPIRE) and offer robust integration capabilities like APIs, connectors, or plug-ins, so they can work seamlessly with your current and future IAM and cybersecurity infrastructure.” RankEZ views this as the next phase of PAM: governing privileged access not only for administrators, but also for services, workloads, and emerging agentic access patterns without losing operational control.

A milestone and a mandate

“To us, being listed as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Privileged Access Management in China is an important milestone for RankEZ,” said James Wang, CEO of RankEZ. “We believe Gartner’s recognition of host-based PEDM as a capability gap and its mention of RankEZ as an emerging provider addressing it validates the direction we have taken: enforce privilege where actions execute, reduce standing admin, and strengthen accountability across the environment.”

Learn more about the RankEZ Privileged Access Management Platform: www.rankez.com/blog

Gartner, Market Guide for Privileged Access Management in China, Mia Yu, 25 May 2026.

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