How Delinea's Iris AI Is Automating the Manual Nightmare of PAM Auditing
Author: Matt Ord
Release Date: 26/01/2026
The Data Graveyard
Most companies record privileged sessions with one goal in mind: checking a box for regulations like SOC2, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS. On paper, they’re compliant and in theory if a breach happens they are able to review the footage. But there’s a massive catch. These recordings are essentially useless unless they are being consistently monitored, which almost never happens. This results in a “digital graveyard” of huge amounts of data sitting on expensive storage with no real purpose other than to satisfy the yearly audit. But what happens when you actually need to find evidence of a security breach?
If a team of 5 admins works 8 hours a day that’s 40 hours daily of privileged session recordings, a 30 second mistake within that footage could be the cause of a serious breach. It is like finding a needle in a haystack where the haystack grows by 40 hours every day. In the unlikely scenario that the cause can be found, to truly review the data it would require high salaried security engineers spending hours skipping through RDP sessions.
Even if you delegated this to a junior security analyst the costs add up fast. In 2025 a junior analyst cost a business roughly £22 per hour. If they spend just half of their day scrubbing through videos and performing spot checks that's £88 a day, £22,000 a year, and only 10% of footage actually reviewed. This manual review bottleneck is why Delinea's Iris AI exists.
The Solution
Instead of dumping video files into storage, Iris AI acts like a high-speed digital analyst that watches every second of every session for you. It turns the digital graveyard into an active searchable transcript.
Automatic transcription: Using computer vision and LLM analytics Iris AI transcribes every command, keystroke and system response. Instead of scrubbing through a three hour RDP session to see if an admin touched a sensitive database, you can just search for key words (“chmod”/”DROP TABLE” etc.) and jump to the exact second it happened. It effectively turns hours of video into a text based audit trail you can scan in seconds.
The heatmap concept: In most cases the vast majority of recorded content is irrelevant to the breach. Iris AI generates a visual risk heat map for every recording. By analysing behaviour, it flags spikes of suspicious activity like unusual file transfers, privilege escalations or deletions. This allows the security team to ignore the unsuspicious activity and focus their attention on red zones.
Evidence based summaries: The biggest time saver is an AI generated summary. Instead of handing an auditor a raw log or a video file, Iris AI provides a concise natural language brief of the session providing the user with the who, what and where details of the recording. This data is essential in providing clear evidence for risk remediation without the manual legwork.
The Value
At the end of the day this is more than just a tech upgrade but rather a massive operational saving.
• Reduced audit cycles: Preparing for a SOC2 or HIPAA audit usually takes weeks of organisation and log gathering. With Iris AI, you can generate compliance ready reports in minutes. Transitioning your auditing process from a scavenger hunt for data to a push button process, saving hundreds of senior engineering hours every year.
• Faster incident response: In the case of a data breach time is of the essence. Every minute an attacker is on your network the recovery cost skycrockets. Iris AI can help reduce the mean time to recovery (MTTR) by identifying exactly what happened in a much shorter time frame.
• Cyber insurance return on investment: Businesses are seeing insurance premiums increase and providers now expect to see more than just stand alone session recordings. They want to see Active Session Monitoring. Being able to prove you use AI to proactively audit your environment prior to a professional review can potentially help you secure better rates and more comprehensive coverage.
The Old vs The New
Simply put, here is how Delinea Iris AI stacks up against the old way of doing things:
Feature: | Traditional Manual Auditing: | Delinea Iris AI Auditing: |
|---|---|---|
Visibility | Depends on the time requirements, of spot checking is done in which >90% of the footage isn’t reviewed | 100% coverage analysing every second of every recording |
Review Speed | 1 hour of video takes >1 hour of human labour to properly review | Iris AI can instantly analyse the footage within minutes |
Searchability | Manual scrubbing | Instant search |
Risk Detection | Reactive: You find the breach after it has occurred | Proactive: High-risk behavior triggers heatmaps and real-time alerts |
Audit Prep | Weeks | Hours |
Compliance | Check the box: satisfies the letter of the requirement, but not the spirit | Audit ready: Provides more than the bare minimum with proof of continuous monitoring |
Closing Points
Security is no longer about building lots of high walls, it is about having better monitoring within the walls. Delinea Iris AI turns your audit logs from a digital graveyard into a proactive defence system that pays for itself in saved man-hours. You stop wasting time and money on “just in case” reviews and start focusing on the risks that actually matter.
By bridging the gap between compliance (recording the data) and security (understanding the data), you stop exhausting talented professionals on manual scrubbing. It’s not about replacing your team, it’s about giving them the visibility they need to stay ahead of the clock and the freedom to dedicate their expertise to higher-value security projects.