Delinea and StrongDM: A Necessary Acquisition in the Privileged Access World

Delinea and StrongDM Acquisition

After spending close to two decades working around identity, access, and privileged security, very few acquisitions genuinely feel necessary. 

The Delinea – StrongDM one does.

Here’s why.

The identity problem we are dealing with today is not the same one we had even five years ago. 

It’s no longer just admins and users. It’s service accounts, pipelines, APIs, workloads, and now AI agents — all needing access, all creating risk.

For years, PAM focused on vaulting and controlling who gets privileged access. StrongDM solved a different but equally painful problem — how access is granted, enforced, and revoked in real time across modern infrastructure, without standing privileges.

Bringing these two together makes sense in a way most mergers don’t.

This acquisition, Delinea and StrongDM, isn’t about adding another feature to a checklist. 

It’s about acknowledging a hard truth many of us have seen in the field:

• Standing access is the enemy.

• Complexity is the enemy. 

• Productivity-killing controls are the enemy.

Organizations need just-in-time, identity-based, continuously governed access, and they need it without slowing teams down. Especially now, when AI-driven automation is moving faster than most security programs can keep up with.

From my experience, this move was overdue. 

PAM without real-time infrastructure access control is incomplete. Infrastructure access without deep privileged governance is risky.

Together, this closes a gap the industry has been working around for years.

What I’m most interested to see next is how this combined capability evolves for non-human identities and AI agents — because that’s where the next wave of identity failures will come from if we don’t get it right.

This feels less like a headline-grabbing acquisition and more like a course correction for the industry.

Curious to hear how others see it — especially those who’ve implemented PAM at scale. Does this solve a real problem in your environment, or just shift it!

By Amit Masand