PALO ALTO, Calif. – November 19, 2025 – StrongDM, the universal access management company, today highlighted growing momentum for its modernized approach to Privileged Access, marked by recognition in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management and inclusion in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. The company also debuted Leash, an open-source project extending continuous authorization to agentic AI.
The milestones reflect accelerating demand as enterprises confront explosive growth in both human and machine identities. A recent PWC survey showed that 79 percent of companies are already adopting AI agents, and industry studies have found machine identities outnumber human identities by as many as 40,000 to 1. This means enterprises face sprawling attack surfaces spanning cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, APIs, and ephemeral workloads.
StrongDM addresses this by continuously evaluating context and other risk signals from any identity to any resource against policy to authorize every privileged action in real time. By enforcing fine-grained authorization at the moment of risk, StrongDM eliminates standing privilege, closes audit gaps, and prevents lateral movement. This enables enterprises to maintain continuous Zero Trust enforcement across humans, machines, and agents without slowing down developers or operations.
As enterprises accelerate adoption of autonomous and agentic systems, StrongDM is also extending its continuous authorization model to this new class of identity. The company recently introduced Leash, an open-source runtime enforcement project that applies StrongDM-style, real-time policy controls to AI agents and autonomous workloads. Leash provides visibility into agent behavior, intercepts actions at the kernel level, and enforces policies before connections are made, bringing the same fine-grained governance used for humans to machines and agentic AI.
"The PAM market is in flux. Enterprises today operate in cloud-native, DevOps-driven environments where privileged activity no longer flows only through login sessions; it also occurs via APIs, ephemeral containers, CI/CD pipelines, agentic AI, and service-to-service communications,” said StrongDM CEO Tim Prendergast. “In these environments, access is ephemeral, contextual, and highly automated. Legacy PAM approaches built around credential vaults and static permissions struggle to govern this reality.”
StrongDM believes placement in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management reflects growing recognition of its role in a market undergoing fundamental change. As enterprises move beyond static credential-based approaches toward continuous authorization architectures, StrongDM’s appearance on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and itsnearly 300% growth from 2021 to 2025 underscore how quickly this shift is accelerating, as organizations seek modern alternatives to legacy PAM solutions.
“The future of privileged access must evolve beyond securing passwords and recording sessions to encompass authorization as a continuous process - an architecture capable of enforcing policy with real-time verification that unifies human and machine access across hybrid contexts,” added Prendergast. “We believe recognition from Gartner and Deloitte, paired with innovations like Leash, reflects the accelerating enterprise shift toward this model and the growing demand for StrongDM’s continuous authorization approach."
To see Leash in action, and for more information about StrongDM, please visit our website.
StrongDM is the universal access management company reimagining privileged access management through the Identity Firewall architecture. Built for enterprises managing explosive growth in both human and machine identities, StrongDM provides real-time authorization enforcement that governs privileged actions across infrastructure, applications, and cloud environments — not just initial access. The platform unifies traditional PAM capabilities with advanced authorization controls, evaluating identity, context, and policy to authorize or block every privileged operation. Security teams gain action-level visibility and control, while end users experience frictionless access. StrongDM enables organizations to evolve toward continuous, context-aware identity governance.
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