Today, we announced our intent to acquire StrongDM, the universal access management company purpose-built for modern engineering, DevOps, and AI-driven environments.
This decision builds on what Delinea has long believed and delivered: identity has become the core control plane for modern security. As the enterprise landscape evolves, so must the ways identity security is applied, extending proven approaches to support cloud-first, automated, and AI-driven operating models.
AI is now embedded at every layer of the enterprise. It powers applications, accelerates DevOps pipelines, automates IT operations, and increasingly acts with autonomy. At the same time, machine identities and service accounts have multiplied, outnumbering humans by orders of magnitude. These identities operate continuously across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments, taking privileged actions at machine speed.
As a result, organizations have lost a centralized point of control over privileged access, creating gaps in visibility and control where risk accumulates faster than security teams can respond.
Why identity security must evolve
For years, privileged access management (PAM) focused on static credentials, standing access, and session-based controls. That approach works very effectively for fixed and virtual infrastructure, with human and machine users logging in and out for discrete tasks.
Modern environments, however, introduce new dimensions. Cloud infrastructure is dynamic and ephemeral. CI/CD pipelines run continuously. Automation and AI systems act independently. Privileged actions increasingly change without a human in the loop. To maintain the same security assurances across these environments, identity controls must extend beyond sessions and adapt dynamically to context and action.
This change in the demands of the environment requires more than static credentials. It requires a real-time ephemeral authorization model based on context and intent. Security teams require detailed session visibility and the capability to stop bad behavior in real time, rather than needing to respond to log-based alerts. The world of AI requires a shift in privileged authorization to ensure visibility and centralized control, enabling effective risk management.
Why we’re bringing Delinea and StrongDM together
Stolen credentials remain the leading cause of breaches. As environments become more dynamic and autonomous, reducing reliance on persistent credentials and enforcing least privilege in real-time becomes an important extension of existing PAM capabilities, not a replacement for them.
StrongDM was built for modern engineering, DevOps, and AI-driven environments. Its cloud-native, just-in-time (JIT) runtime authorization model enforces policy at the moment privileged access is requested and used, supporting both ephemeral and persistent access models while reducing reliance on standing access and long-lived credentials.
By combining Delinea’s market leadership in enterprise PAM, identity threat detection, and governance with StrongDM’s JIT runtime authorization, we will form a unified identity security platform that enables continuous evaluation of identity, context, and policy at run-time. This includes real-time enforcement and response, such as session termination, while supporting existing infrastructure and investments.
Customers will no longer need to layer additional tools around core privileged access capabilities. By integrating StrongDM with Delinea’s modern, cloud-native platform, customers will gain a powerful, centralized solution to enforce privileged access across both traditional infrastructure and ephemeral, AI-centric environments—with strong, seamless policy enforcement that is continuous, contextual, and applied at the moment of action.
Modernization without revolution
We recognize that identity security modernization must be practical. Customers have made significant investments in PAM, and those investments continue to deliver value. With Delinea and StrongDM, customers will be able to enhance their current PAM deployments by progressively extending coverage into cloud, DevOps, and AI-driven workloads. Over time, enterprises will have the ability to reduce standing privileges, minimize persistent credentials, and apply consistent policy and governance across both traditional and modern environments, without disrupting operations or slowing down the business.
Securing the next generation of privileged identities
Autonomous AI agents represent a new class of highly privileged identities. Because AI will use context and make choices at machine speed, they should not be given standing privileges based on static certificate-based credentials. Securing these identities requires authorization that is ephemeral, precise, and scoped to specific actions, while still meeting enterprise requirements for visibility, policy enforcement, and auditability.
By extending Delinea’s platform with runtime authorization and advanced auditing, customers will be able to apply the same governance and compliance standards to AI and machine identities that they expect for human access, continuously and in real time. Acquiring StrongDM will accelerate Delinea’s evolution toward a modern identity security control plane that supports legacy environments while addressing the realities of cloud-first and AI-driven enterprises.
Interested in learning more about how Delinea and StrongDM can help you evolve your identity security strategies to support always-on, continuous environments? Read more here.