We look at why there so many big acquisitions are taking place this year
What is common between the process of galaxy formation and market consolidation? One theory about how galaxies came about says they are formed by the rapid collapse of huge gas clouds early in the universe, creating stars and galaxies quickly. The second, that better fits what telescopes actually show, titled hierarchical merging, tells a slower story: small clumps of matter formed first, then gradually merged with neighbors, building larger and larger structures over billions of years until galaxies like our own took shape. Replace gas clouds with point solutions and gravity with acquisition capital, and you have a reasonably precise model of the identity and access management market in 2026.
IAM acquisitions: Heading to Consolidation
The market is witnessing some very interesting ID-centered acquisitions both being started and completed. In 2026 alone, Palo Alto Networks acquired CyberArk; Delinea has acquired StrongDM; and CrowdStrike is acquiring SGNL.
In the first case, the deal allows Palo Alto to offer one combined system for protecting the logins and access of employees, software, and AI tools across a company’s networks and cloud systems. Palo Alto was strong on network and cloud security but did not have a real identity product of its own. This acquisition fills that gap.
Coming to SGNL, which offers just-in-time security, the acquisition allowed CrowdStrike to provide dynamic access control, ensuring that time-limited, task-specific permissions are granted to users or machines only when required, and automatically revoking them once the task is completed.
In the Delinea deal, Delinea gets StrongDM’s just-in-time access technology, which controls privileged actions in real time instead of only at login. The deal allows Delinea to manage access for an expanded environment, that now includes developers, automated tools, and AI systems, as well as human admins.
While both are JIT providers, the context is slightly different. SGNL’s, which calls its access method as “continuous Identity,” decides whether to grant access right now, based on what is happening (like an open ticket). StrongDM controls what happens once access is granted, enforcing, and logging each action in real time.
Why this Consolidation was Overdue?
Coming back to the galaxy formation and the part where small clumps of matter form first bit; the same happened with the identity landscape: fragmenting. As technology (and consequently, new threats) progressed, newer access controls and newer products and capabilities kept getting added to enterprise identity stacks. Each of these products came with their own baggage that added to the overall complexity: a new vendor, a new console, and another definition of “identity,” and most of it decentralized, because it was added when the need arose. All of this results into an identity stack that is…interesting, and then came remote work, cloud, and SaaS.
Sanket Kadam, Senior Analyst, QKS Group, lays it out: “As organizations manage human, machine, and AI identities at scale, market consolidation reflects the need for integrated identity platforms that improve governance, simplify operations, and strengthen cyber resilience. Also, The rise of AI agents is fundamentally reshaping the IAM market. Organizations can no longer rely on disconnected identity tools. They require unified platforms capable of delivering continuous visibility, adaptive authorization, and governance across every identity, whether human or machine.”
For very obvious reasons like less spending on on-premises infra, companies pivoted to cloud in a big way. This pivot ensured identity surface is spread across multiple directories, legacy apps, and inconsistent permission models, as running everything through one central system was reduced and adoption dozens of separate cloud apps, each with its own login and access rules, became the norm. Every new app increasingly turned the network into a jigsaw puzzle.
Remote work was the cherry on the pile. Organizational perimeter became irrelevant. The identity became the new perimeter. The problem was that it was not just the humans that needed identification. While IAM responsibilities for even humans are increasingly split across teams, creating blind spots, now automated tools, service accounts, and AI agents also needed access. This was a category that older systems were never built to handle, adding an entirely new layer of fragmentation on top of the human-identity mess.
The changes, coupled with technological advancements allowing the bad actors to launch novel types of attacks, and the consequent tightened norms, meant that some type of consolidation was needed to ensure unified control, which was the minimum the new laws needed. This was now a legal problem, and an efficiency problem. The penny had to finally drop.
What Lies Ahead?
The legal problem now makes fragmentation a business risk, not just an IT problem. We can safely expect that as the regulators across financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are mandating stronger identity controls, and auditors increasingly expect organizations to demonstrate real-time visibility of who has access to what, the trend of shifting to platforms from point solutions, and vendors joining hands to provide them, will continue. Comparing it with the example of galaxy formation, the matter will continue to merge with its neighbors.