Delinea to acquire StrongDM for unified identity security
Delinea signed a definitive agreement to acquire StrongDM, combining the two companies' identity-focused offerings into a single platform intended to address privileged access for human and non-human identities, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents.
The companies described rising AI adoption and a growing number of non-human identities as drivers that required privileged access to be secured in real time across cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premises (on-prem) environments.
StrongDM’s Just-In-Time Access (JIT) runtime authorization was presented as an extension to the Delinea Platform powered by Iris AI, designed to provide a unified policy, governance, and audit layer that enforces least privilege at the moment of action while supporting both ephemeral and credential-based access models and a transition toward zero standing privilege (ZSP).
The combined platform was outlined to cover developer access to cloud infrastructure, databases, and containers while enforcing least privilege in real time; to reduce exposure to credential theft, phishing, and software supply chain attacks by minimizing persistent credentials; to provide unified visibility, auditability, and continuous policy enforcement for privileged actions by machine and agentic AI identities; and to centralize policy, authorization, and audit across on-prem, cloud, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments.
“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. “Stolen or lost credentials remain the number one cause of breaches, which makes identity the core control layer for modern security,” said Adversarial Robustness Test (ART) Gilliland, CEO at Delinea.
The press release said Piper Sandler served as financial advisor to Delinea, the acquisition was subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory review, and the transaction was expected to close in Q1 2026.