Delinea + StrongDM, AuthSignal Palm-auth, Agentic least priv

Jan 20, 2026

Strategic & Emerging Headlines

Delinea to acquire StrongDM

Hot on the back of CrowdStrike announcing they are to acquire SGNL, privileged access provider and more latterly AI-driven platform provider Delinea announced they are to acquire StrongDM.

Delinea (who rebranded from Thycotic after they acquired Centrify) has traditionally been focused on the privileged space, competing with the likes of CyberArk and BeyondTrust. With over 1200 employees (according to LinkedIn) and several other recent IAM related acquisitions, they are building out a strategic platform capable of delivering a range of human, non-human, privileged and now it seems authorization related use cases.

Delinea describe themselves today as:

“Delinea made Privileged Access Management (PAM) seamless. But today’s enterprises need more than just PAM. They need identity controls that are intelligent, adaptive, and measurable. Powered by Delinea Iris AI, our platform delivers centralized, risk-based authorization to discover, monitor, govern, and secure all identities.

Their other recent related acquisitions include:

So how does StrongDM fit in here? They describe themselves as:

“Control what happens after login. Authorization at runtime. Productivity in real time. StrongDM gives you the control PAM promised but never delivered. Enforce policy in real time, eliminate passwords, and meet developers where they are.”

Their platform delivers an access-analyse-govern set of capabilities, with the emphasis on a workstation client, gateway enforcer and central control plane. Protected resources seem typically to be in the infrastructure asset space, with a consistent zero-trust narrative for continuous and seamless access.

So what will this mean for Delinea prospects and customers and the wider identity security sector?

The Delinea press release gives a few insights. The initial paragraph sets the scene by instantly distancing Delinea from their PAM roots and places StrongDM in the just-in-time (JiT) authorization space:

“Delinea, a pioneering provider of solutions for securing human and machine identities through centralized authorization, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire StrongDM, the universal access management company purpose-built for modern engineering, DevOps, and AI-driven environments. Delinea’s leadership in enterprise privileged access management (PAM), combined with StrongDM’s just-in-time (JIT) runtime authorization capabilities and developer-first access model, will form a new class of identity security platform designed for continuous, always-on environments.”

So here we start to see a more unified platform story - Delinea catering for both people and non-humans (including agents) with StrongDM playing the card of being a “universal access management” player - which supports a broader set of stakeholders including the ever-under-pressure DevOps.

This positions Delinea to be a more protect “anything, anywhere” platform - be that humans, non-humans or agents (all of whom by design will need the use of privileged permissions) wanting to gain access to a much broader array of resources - from code to infrastructure.

The rise of AI adoption has increased the need for improved automation and JiT in ways in which both credentials and in turn permissions are assigned and removed.

So what does the combined machine let organisations achieve?

“The combination of Delinea and StrongDM reflects the evolution of traditional session-based PAM into a scalable, modern identity security control plane that governs privileged access across all human and NHIs through JIT runtime authorization. This approach enables continuous evaluation and response, which is particularly valuable for organizations delivering seamless access to cloud infrastructure, production databases, and automated CI/CD pipelines that developers demand while providing the compliance and control that security requires.”

This brings them more in line from a narrative point of view with vendors like P0 and Teleport who have capable platforms aimed to delivering JiT and cloud-centric privileged management for a broader array of stakeholders.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory review, and is expected to close in Q1 2026. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.