Delinea, a foremost innovator in identity security technology, has now made a formal announcement about a strategic acquisition plan for StrongDM. StrongDM is a universal access management company that is appropriately built for engineering, deployment operations, or AI-infused workflows. All of this has been planned to change the future of privileged access security.
Delinea’s established expertise in enterprise-grade Privileged Access Management (PAM) combined with StrongDM’s just-in-time (JIT) runtime authorization and developer-first access model will create a unified identity security platform. The integrated solution aims to support continuous, always-on operations across human users, non-human identities, and autonomous AI agents.
As organizations adopt AI at scale and non-human identities increasingly outnumber human users, there is a growing need for real-time enforcement of least-privilege policies across cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premises infrastructures. Under the terms of the agreement, StrongDM’s runtime authorization capabilities will extend Delinea’s platform powered by Iris AI to offer a single, cohesive policy, governance, and audit layer that enforces least privilege at the moment of action.
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Industry analysts emphasize the importance of this evolutionary step in identity security: “By viewing your JIT / ZSP initiative as a journey, you can make measurable progress on reducing the attack surface created by standing privileges in your environment – while minimizing impact on operations and maximizing returns on existing investments in PAM technologies.” – Gartner®, Reduce Risk Through a Just-in-Time Approach to PAM, Paul Mezzera, Nayara Sangiorgio, Michael Kelley, Abhyuday Data, Felix Gaehtgens, April 2025
Customer interest in unified security frameworks continues to grow: “As we move forward scaling agentic AI, choosing the right partner to secure AI agents from day one is critical,” said Stephen Davis, CISO at Hubbell Incorporated. “Bringing together Delinea and StrongDM will give us a unified way to monitor, authorize, and govern privileged access for IT teams, developers, and AI agents across on-prem and cloud environments – all in a single platform.”
Empowering Modern Identity Security
The acquisition signals a shift from traditional session-based PAM toward a more dynamic identity-centric control plane.
The combined platform will offer:
- Real-time privileged access controls for developers accessing cloud infrastructure, databases, and containers while enforcing least privilege;
- Reduced risk of credential compromise by minimizing persistent credentials and exposure to phishing, software supply chain attacks, and credential theft;
- Comprehensive AI governance and control, with unified visibility, auditability, and policy enforcement over actions taken by machine and agentic AI identities;
- Simplified compliance and operations, through a centralized management plane covering on-premises, cloud, and SaaS ecosystems.
Reflecting on the acquisition, Delinea CEO Art Gilliland said: “Stolen or lost credentials remain the number one cause of breaches, which makes identity the core control layer for modern security,” “This acquisition will accelerate our evolution toward modern, ephemeral access models typical of cloud and AI-centric environments, empowering organizations to secure NHIs with the same rigor applied to human access. We’re giving organizations the freedom to move faster without compromising security or control.”
Tim Prendergast, CEO of StrongDM, added: “Access models designed for static infrastructure and human users simply don’t work in continuous cloud and AI-driven environments. By joining Delinea, we will deliver runtime authorization at enterprise scale, securing every privileged action through policy-based enforcement that stays invisible to developers and operators. This is identity security built for how modern enterprises actually run.”
Seamless Transition and Future Innovation
The combined platform is engineered to transform identity security without forcing enterprises to walk away from existing PAM solutions. Enterprises are then able to seamlessly migrate from static models of privilege and credentials to access to a dynamic privilege model for human as well as machine entities.
