The machine identity takeover

The digital world has undergone a quiet but absolute inversion. For decades, the primary entity on a network was a human being. Today, user accounts are not only the minority, but their makeup of the total number of identities that need to be managed continues to shrink. The proliferation of microservices and the increased adoption of AI agents continue to push us deeper into a world dominated by machine identities.

The modern enterprise is no longer defined by employees logging into workstations, but by a sprawling, invisible workforce of microservices, the ever-growing use of access-related APIs, and the increasing use of AI agents that interact and direct them. Research has shown that on average organizations run 50 machine identities per human identity¹ In advanced cloud environments¹.

The changing identity and access management requirements are driven by two fundamental shifts in computing architecture.

Microservices continued march

Early on, pioneers ...