PALO ALTO, Calif. – December 8, 2025 – StrongDM, the universal access management company, today announced Universal Privileged Access Authorization (UPAA), a modernized approach to privileged access that replaces legacy, vault-centric models with continuous, real-time authorization for every privileged action. UPAA enables enterprises to enforce Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) by eliminating static credentials and governing access across cloud, hybrid, and AI-driven environments.
Enterprises today face unprecedented complexity as machine identities, ephemeral cloud services, and autonomous workloads rapidly outpace human users. Traditional PAM tools, which are rooted in password vaults and session-level controls, cannot keep pace with ephemeral infrastructure, dynamic cloud roles, or the real-time authorization demands of modern environments.
According to Gartner, Inc., “Privileged access management (PAM) requirements have evolved beyond traditional credential vaulting and session management. Managing ephemeral accounts and implementing just-in-time access are more critical for cloud-native environments than securing long-lived credentials.” This shift underscores the need for an authorization-first model that governs every privileged action, not just every login.
UPAA introduces three foundational capabilities designed to eliminate risk, reduce complexity, and accelerate cloud velocity:
- Continuous, Real-Time Authorization: UPAA evaluates every command, query, API call, and privileged action against the current context and policy throughout the entire session. This replaces credential retrieval with dynamic, time-limited entitlements, enabling instantaneous containment of risky behavior and making ZSP the default operational state.
- Complete Entitlement Visibility: Security and IAM teams gain a unified, real-time inventory of every privilege across their infrastructure. UPAA consolidates fragmented privilege data into a single view, reducing compliance audit effort from 40 hours to minutes and enabling secure offboarding in under 60 seconds.
- Vault-Agnostic Secrets Management: UPAA provides a low-friction migration path from vault-centric access systems while remaining fully vault-agnostic. It supports seamless onboarding and migration without requiring refactoring or rewriting of applications or workflows, allowing organizations to migrate smoothly from legacy tools without being tied to their existing vault.
With UPAA, StrongDM delivers the Authorization Control Plane needed to secure a world where entities and their associated access requirements are constantly changing. Instead of forcing teams to juggle secrets across scattered systems, StrongDM routes every request through a single, governed path that applies policy in real time. This removes the risks created by static credentials and eliminates the operational drag of legacy, vault‑centric access models.
“Identity sprawl, autonomous workloads, and cloud speed have completely changed the nature of privileged access,” said Tim Prendergast, CEO of StrongDM. “You cannot secure modern infrastructure with a model built around static credentials and intermittent checks. UPAA replaces that broken paradigm entirely. By authorizing every action in real time and eliminating standing privilege across humans, machines, and workloads, we’re giving enterprises a control plane that finally keeps pace with how they operate.”
UPAA marks a shift in how enterprises think about privileged access. By unifying governance across humans, machines, and agents, the Authorization Control Plane becomes a strategic enabler, not just a security tool. It removes operational bottlenecks, accelerates cloud velocity, and gives teams the confidence that every privileged action is evaluated and enforced precisely when it matters. This is the foundation enterprises need to safely scale automation, adopt agent-driven workflows, and maintain control in environments where entities and access requirements change continuously.
For more information about UPAA or to try a demo, please visit our website.
Gartner®, Empower Your Engineering Teams With Privileged Infrastructure Access, 24 September 2025
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About StrongDM
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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