Unified platform combines enterprise PAM with just-in-time runtime authorization to eliminate standing privileges in AI-driven environments.
Delinea has announced the completion of its acquisition of StrongDM, a universal access management platform designed for modern engineering, DevOps, and AI-driven environments. The move aims to strengthen enterprise security by combining privileged access management (PAM) with just-in-time (JIT) runtime authorization, helping organizations better manage identities across increasingly automated infrastructure.
As enterprises scale agentic AI systems and automation, privileged access is increasingly required by non-human identities (NHIs) such as AI agents, automated services, and machine workloads operating across hybrid and cloud-native environments. These autonomous identities introduce security risks that traditional static, credential-based access models were not designed to manage.
By integrating Delinea’s enterprise PAM capabilities with StrongDM’s runtime authorization technology, organizations can discover and govern every identity while enforcing least-privilege access at the moment an action occurs. The combined approach enables enterprises to move toward Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP), a security model where persistent privileges are eliminated and access is granted only when needed.
Art Gilliland, CEO of Delinea, said that standing and hard-coded privileges remain one of the biggest security risks in modern AI-driven infrastructure. He noted that security teams have traditionally had to balance strong governance policies with the need to maintain developer productivity and operational speed. By integrating StrongDM’s runtime authorization into the Delinea platform, the company aims to support faster and more secure adoption of AI technologies.
The combined platform brings together enterprise-grade privileged access management and runtime authorization within a unified identity security control plane powered by Delinea Iris AI. This platform enables real-time policy evaluation and governance of privileged actions performed by both human users and machine identities across modern IT environments.
With the integration, organizations gain improved visibility and control over privileged access across infrastructure, databases, containers and CI/CD pipelines. The system also reduces exposure to credential theft, phishing attacks and software supply chain threats by minimizing the use of persistent credentials. In addition, it enables real-time governance and auditing of actions performed by AI agents and other non-human identities through centralized monitoring and enforcement.
Emanuel Figueroa, Senior Research Analyst at IDC, said the rapid rise of agentic AI and machine identities is accelerating operational processes to machine speed, exposing the limitations of traditional static privilege models. By incorporating StrongDM’s runtime access capabilities into the Delinea platform, organizations can extend Zero Trust security principles to the precise moment when privileged actions occur and move closer to implementing Zero Standing Privilege across both traditional and cloud-native infrastructure.
Raghu Valipireddy, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Axos Financial, welcomed the integration of the two platforms. He explained that Delinea has secured privileged access across the company’s traditional infrastructure for nearly a decade, while StrongDM introduced innovative just-in-time access for modern database and cloud environments. According to him, the unified platform will significantly strengthen the organization’s security posture by enabling continuous discovery, governance and real-time enforcement of least-privilege access across critical systems and data, supporting the company’s AI initiatives and long-term security strategy.
With the acquisition now complete, Delinea aims to position identity as the central control plane for modern cybersecurity, ensuring that every privileged action performed by human or machine identities is evaluated and authorized in real time. The company believes this approach will help organizations eliminate standing privileges and strengthen security in AI-driven digital environments.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
