StrongDM is a zero trust privileged access management platform, now part of Delinea. It gives engineers, automation and AI agents access to databases, servers, Kubernetes clusters, clouds and web applications without ever handing them the underlying credentials, and authorises each privileged action at the moment it happens.
Standing access and shared credentials are the usual weak points in infrastructure access. StrongDM replaces them with brokered connections, just-in-time access and context-aware policy, and records every session and query.
At A Glance
| Vendor | StrongDM, part of Delinea |
|---|---|
| Category | Privileged access management and runtime authorisation |
| Identities covered | Human users, non-human identities and AI agents |
| Deployment | StrongDM service, client software and proxy nodes in the customer’s infrastructure |
| Agentic AI | Secure AI add-on: MCP Gateway, MCP Broker, AI Attribution |
| Market classification | Privileged Access Management; also Workload Identity |
What StrongDM Does
StrongDM combines authentication, authorisation, networking and observability in one platform. Users connect to resources through it, and it evaluates identity, context and policy to allow or block every privileged operation. Standing access is kept to what people need day to day, and everything else is granted just in time. The same controls apply to human and non-human identities across cloud and on-premises environments, covering cloud infrastructure, production databases, containers and CI/CD pipelines. Since joining Delinea, StrongDM’s focus has extended to governing in real time the privileged actions taken by AI agents.
Products
StrongDM Access Platform
The access platform is for organisations that want engineers to reach production systems without passwords or keys on their laptops. Access is granted through roles with static rules, or dynamic rules that match resources by tag or type. Access workflows let users request just-in-time access with automatic or manual approval. Policies written in Cedar can weigh location and device trust, block specific commands, or require MFA or an approval for sensitive resource types.
StrongDM Vault And Secret Engines
StrongDM Vault manages and rotates credentials centrally through secret engines. Resource-specific engines rotate credentials for Active Directory, Microsoft SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL. A Key Value engine stores secrets such as shared API keys without rotating them in any target resource. Copies of managed credentials are kept in a backing secret store.
How It Works
A deployment has three parts: a client on the user’s machine, nodes that run in the customer’s own infrastructure, and the StrongDM service that checks authorisation. Nodes proxy traffic from clients to resources and authenticate to each resource without ever exposing its credentials to the user.
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Client | The StrongDM Desktop app or CLI, which users authenticate with before working with resources. |
| Nodes | Proxy clusters, or separate gateways and relays, placed on servers in the customer’s network. |
| Resources | The target systems. The final node acquires credentials and authenticates with the resource on the user’s behalf. |
| Requests and approvals | Just-in-time requests are raised in the Admin UI, the CLI or a chat tool, and approvals can run in a ticketing system. |
| Audit logs | Log Stream sends audit logs to object storage, and local logs can feed other tools. |
Identities And Systems Covered
| Human users | Engineers and administrators connecting through the Desktop app or CLI |
|---|---|
| Non-human identities | Automation and service identities taking privileged actions |
| AI agents | Desktop AI agents and MCP clients |
| Infrastructure | Databases, servers, Kubernetes clusters, clouds, web applications, containers and CI/CD pipelines, in cloud and on-premises environments |
Agentic AI Capabilities
The Secure AI add-on extends the platform to AI agents and MCP through three components.
MCP Gateway
The MCP Gateway proxies streamable HTTP MCP servers through StrongDM, one upstream MCP server hostname per gateway resource. It centralises authentication, authorisation, credential management and audit for every tool invocation: policies are checked before a tool call is passed on, sessions appear in the Activities log and each tool call is listed under Queries.
MCP Broker For Desktop AI Agents
The MCP Broker is deployed to user machines so that desktop agents get “credential-less, fully audited access to approved databases, servers, and clusters”, using the entitlements of the person running them.
AI Attribution
AI Attribution detects supported AI tools in resource sessions and queries. Administrators can then use that initiator data in policies, for example to treat an agent’s query differently from a person’s.
Integrations
| Area | Integrations |
|---|---|
| Identity providers | Okta (OIDC and SAML SSO, SCIM), Microsoft Entra ID (OIDC SSO, provisioning), JumpCloud, generic SCIM providers |
| Access requests | Slack, Microsoft Teams |
| Approval workflows | Jira, ServiceNow |
| Secret stores | AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager, HashiCorp Vault |
| Log export | Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage; Splunk, CloudWatch, Filebeat, Graylog, Rsyslog |
Company Background
| Ownership | Part of Delinea since Delinea completed its acquisition of StrongDM on 5 March 2026. |
|---|---|
| Parent leadership | Art Gilliland, CEO of Delinea. |
| Platform | StrongDM’s runtime authorisation forms part of Delinea’s unified identity security control plane. |
Note: This overview is compiled from StrongDM’s publicly available information as of 3 November 2026. It is provided for information only. NHI Mgmt Group does not endorse any vendor, and nothing on this page represents the opinions of NHI Mgmt Group.