NAVIGATING THE MACHINE IDENTITY EXPLOSION IN THE AGE OF AI
As automation and agentic AI drive an unprecedented surge in machine identities, Omer Grossman, Chief Trust Officer, CyberArk, says organisations are being forced to rethink identity security governance at scale. he rapid acceleration of
A automation across enterprise IT has fundamentally reshaped how identities are created managed and secured. From provisioning and workload management to containers and artificial intelligence agents nearly every aspect of infrastructure is now automated. This shift has triggered an explosion in machine identities often referred to as identity sprawl.
Each machine or agent requires its own identity and CyberArk research shows that machine identities already outnumber human ones by 82 to 1. In the APAC region this growth is especially pronounced as organisations aggressively modernise cloud and DevOps environments.
Cloud platforms in particular generate short-lived high-privilege machine identities at massive scale. Security teams are being asked to balance what can be described as a three-legged stool: identities that are shortlived high-privilege and created at scale through automation.
A financial services firm in Singapore for example may start with 50,000 machine identities. Once it automates its DevOps pipeline that number can grow ten-fold to 500,000 in under 18 months.
Automation is essential for managing millions of certificates secrets and credentials. At the same time it amplifies security challenges. This reality demands a dynamic adaptive approach where identity lifecycle management becomes a core operational requirement and every identity interacting with a system is continuously verified.
The security risks tied to this growth are significant. The first wave of AI focused on machine learning and predictive analytics followed by generative AI which made the technology conversational and creative. Today the third wave is agentic AI.
Agentic AI systems are autonomous agents that can sense their environment reason make decisions and act without direct human oversight. These agents operate at machine speed and scale making manual oversight impractical.
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INTELLIGENT CIO APAC www. intelligentcio. com