Why securing human, machine, and AI identities will define enterprise resilience in 2026

By Rohan Vaidya, Area Vice President, India & SAARC, CyberArk

Identity security will be central to the conflict between human adaptability and technological advancement in 2026. India is entering an era dominated by AI agents, shrinking certificate lifespans, hardware scarcity, and an increasingly complex digital workforce. In this new reality, trust will be just as important as innovation for building resilience.

The first major shift will come from shorter certificate lifecycles. Starting in March 2026, the maximum validity for digital certificates will drop from 398 to 200 days, and Indian businesses will struggle to adapt as many are still manually managing certificate lifecycles. This will result in outages driven by expired certificates or unmanaged machine identities. Automation is crucial to ensuring such a scenario doesn’t happen.

Autonomous AI agents will become a standard part of business workflows. As Indian companies adopt frameworks like the Model Context ...