Delinea has signed an agreement to acquire StrongDM, an access management company made for contemporary engineering, DevOps, and AI-powered settings. This acquisition aims to enhance identity security by crafting a new hybrid platform for continuous, always-on operations.
In today’s landscape, marked by rapid AI adoption, enterprises require security solutions across diverse environments, including cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premises. StrongDM’s just-in-time (JIT) runtime authorisation integrates with Delinea’s Iris AI-driven platform to provide a unified policy, governance, and audit framework that enforces least privilege at the point of action.
Such a framework aims to support both ephemeral and credential-based access models, for a smooth transition towards a zero standing privilege (ZSP) model. This allows enterprises to maintain existing investments in privileged access management (PAM) while upgrading infrastructure.
Intended advantages of this collaborative platform include:
- Frictionless and secure developer access to sensitive resources like cloud infrastructures and databases, ensuring real-time privilege enforcement.
- Reduced vulnerability to credential theft and software supply chain attacks through the minimisation of persistent credentials.
- Comprehensive AI governance and real-time oversight of autonomous agents, providing continuous policy reinforcement for machine and AI-derived identities.
- Enhanced compliance and simplified operations, offering a centralised control plane for overseeing privileged access policies across human and machine identities.
Art Gilliland, CEO at Delinea, highlighted the implications of such an acquisition, noting the adaptability it brings to modern, cloud-centric, AI-driven environments. Tim Prendergast, CEO of StrongDM, emphasised the significance of merging their runtime authorisation solution at scale.
By uniting these strengths, the updated platform aims to support enterprises in modernising security protocols without overhauling existing systems. This is designed for businesses where developers, machines, and AI agents necessitate privileged access without immobilising operations.
The deal, with Piper Sandler acting as financial advisor, awaits regulatory approval and is expected to finalise in Q1 2026.
