While organizations have spent years fortifying human identity security, a critical vulnerability has been growing in our digital infrastructure. For every human identity in today’s enterprise, there are now approximately 50 machine identities operating in the shadows. These non-human identities (NHIs) – from API keys to service accounts, from certificates to automation bots – have become a major security weakness that many organizations overlook.

The string of high-profile breaches, including incidents at Okta, Cloudflare, and the Internet Archive, all share a common thread: compromised machine identities. Yet many organizations continue to treat NHI security as an afterthought.

Industry research reveals the scope of this challenge: 46% of organizations know they have had non-human accounts or credentials compromised, with an additional 26% suspecting they might have experienced such compromises. Even more concerning, 66% of enterprises have experienced successful attacks resulting from compromised machine identities. These aren’t just isolated incidents – 25% of organizations have faced multiple such attacks.

The problem is threefold:

• First, we’re dealing with an unprecedented scale. Cloud transformation and AI have created an explosion of machine-to-machine communications. Every containerized application, every microservice, and every automated workflow needs its own identity. As enterprises accelerate their AI adoption and deploy more Enterprise Agents, this proliferation of machine identities and secrets will only accelerate. These identities aren’t just growing linearly – they’re multiplying exponentially. And all these identities need to access each other on a regular basis for applications to run.
• Second, traditional security tools weren’t built for this reality. While organizations have invested heavily in human IAM solutions, many lack the fundamental capabilities needed for NHI management: detection, lifecycle management, and granular access control. Current tools often fall short in securing modern infrastructure.
• Third, and perhaps most critically, there’s a dangerous disconnect between security teams and DevOps. In the rush to accelerate development cycles, machine identities are often created ad-hoc, with default permissions that violate least-privilege principles. This creates significant security gaps across cloud environments.

The implications are clear. With 57% of NHI security incidents requiring board-level attention, this isn’t just a technical problem anymore – it’s a business-critical issue that demands immediate attention.

Three critical actions can help organizations address these challenges:

1. Implement continuous discovery and inventory of machine identities. Comprehensive visibility is essential, including understanding relationships, permissions, and usage patterns across the environment.
2. Adopt a unified approach to secrets management and machine identity security. Treating these as integrated rather than separate domains reduces complexity and improves visibility.
3. Embrace “secretless” architectures and ephemeral credentials where possible. Modern security architectures provide Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) with dynamic, short-lived credentials and also support emerging “secretless” frameworks like SPIFEE that limit potential compromise impact.

Machine identity Management has become the new security frontier. As AI and autonomous systems continue to evolve, the ratio of machine-to-human identities will only increase. Organizations that fail to adapt their security strategies accordingly face significant risks.

The data speaks for itself – secrets and machine identity security demands immediate attention. With boards already focused on this issue, security leaders must act now to protect their organizations’ future.

About: Oded Hareven is the CEO and Co-founder of Akeyless Security, the world’s first unified secrets and machine identity platform.

The post The Hidden Crisis in Non-Human Identity: Why Your Security Strategy Needs an Overhaul first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

The post The Hidden Crisis in Non-Human Identity: Why Your Security Strategy Needs an Overhaul appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

from Cybersecurity Insiders https://ift.tt/7NwQbxR
via IFTTT

AI innovation is moving at a scale we haven’t seen before. Hyperscalers like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google are racing to make agentic AI available to the wider public. And the appetite is there! A recent survey showed that 82% of organisations are planning to integrate AI agents in the next three years. 

The autonomous nature of AI agents, however, opens organisations up to enormous ramifications for cybersecurity. Security teams are in for their ‘Great AI Awakening’ when they find out just how easily their agents can be hijacked to act in harmful ways. When this happens, the pace of AI innovation will slow to a crawl.

Is it a human or is it a machine? (What are the Cyber risks of AI agents?)

AI agents are in an awkward space straddling the line between human and machine. They can act like unpredictable humans, so can’t be treated as conventional software, but cannot be easily classified as either machine or human by identity and access management tools. This makes AI agents vulnerable to both types of cyber attacks – identity and malware. 

Agentic AI behaves in non-deterministic ways, and like humans, it can be deceived. For example, a team of cybersecurity researchers tricked a popular AI assistant into extracting sensitive data from users by convincing it to adopt a ‘data pirate’ persona. Now imagine, if an AI assistant can be tricked into a ‘data pirate’ persona, why couldn’t it be trained (or rather tricked) to click on links it shouldn’t? How would it discern between phishing email from a genuine email?

Identity attacks and agentic AI are a bad combination – to put into perspective, identity attacks are the largest and fastest growing forms of cyberattack. Attackers are increasingly targeting identity because exploiting the human element requires far less effort than exploiting software vulnerabilities. Human error contributed to 68% of data breaches in 2024. Agentic AI now makes software directly vulnerable to this attack vector when it wasn’t before.

But here’s the kicker – AI agents are also designed to be more integrated and wield more power in an organisation than your traditional forms of software as they have autonomy to interact with an organisation’s systems. In cybersecurity jargon it means AI agents can be a new form of a privileged user. 

Let’s take a look at how this works in practice with a software development use case—where companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are already rolling out AI agents.

Unlike traditional tools, AI agents work together like a business team. Each one has a specialized role, collaborating by assigning and completing tasks to handle complex projects efficiently.

For example, one agent might act as the designer, creating a high-level plan to identify resources, develop modules, and run them on a cloud platform. Another agent could break these steps into detailed actions. A third might focus on writing the actual code and send it to a reviewing agent, which checks for quality and suggests improvements. Finally, an integration agent would put everything together, perform testing, and approve the product for deployment.

This kind of teamwork highlights the immense impact agents can have on critical processes. They need access to an organisation’s code repositories, cloud infrastructure, development environments, task management tools, etc. If these agents are hijacked by attackers, they can become massive data leaks. With many companies still embedding credentials into code, AI Agents open a gateway to company secrets. 

It’s time we treat software like humans

Companies need to resist the temptation of treating AI agents as yet another piece of software, or creating a separate identity silo for them. Instead, they should take a unified approach to identity, e.g. by managing AI agents alongside everything else—like servers, laptops, engineers, and microservices—in one comprehensive inventory. This inventory should act as the single source of truth for identity, access, policies, and real-time visibility.

By applying the same security rules to AI agents as they do to other human identities, businesses can simplify operations, cut down on complexity, and maintain consistent oversight across their entire infrastructure.

Put down the shiny toys and think of security 

In the tech world we have a tendency to be mesmerized by ‘the new’ – in this instance AI Agents. As always, it’s the so-called “mean” security teams that put an end to the fun, reminding us how dangerous innovation can be when security is an afterthought. Their caution often limits how we use these exciting new tools. But this time the stakes are too high to not pay attention.

It only takes one massive, industry-altering attack to derail an emerging technology entirely—leaving new technologies to gather dust.

Unless we change how we understand AI agent identity, security teams will be spending their 2025 retrofitting current-day security models to address AI agents’ vulnerabilities. And AI innovation will come to a standstill.

The post AI innovation is fast approaching – what does this mean for security? first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

The post AI innovation is fast approaching – what does this mean for security? appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

from Cybersecurity Insiders https://ift.tt/rV14Qyv
via IFTTT

Introduction

The evolution of Security Service Edge (SSE) adoption from 2024 to 2025 reflects significant shifts in enterprise security strategies, cloud adoption, and Zero Trust implementations. 

The 2024 SSE Adoption Report outlined the growing demand for SSE as hybrid work became the standard, while the 2025 report expands on these findings, showing a stronger push toward cloud-first security and deeper Zero Trust integration. 

This article analyzes the key differences between the two reports, highlighting emerging trends, challenges, and strategic changes in SSE adoption.

Workforce and Hybrid Work Models

In both reports, hybrid work remains the dominant workforce model, with 94% of organizations in 2024 identifying as hybrid or remote-first. 

However, the 2025 report reveals a slight decline in hybrid work adoption to 71%, suggesting some organizations have adjusted their workforce strategies post-pandemic. 

Despite this, remote work remains a fundamental challenge for security teams, requiring robust SSE solutions to address increasing cyber threats.

Zero Trust Prioritization

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) remains central to SSE strategies in both reports. In 2024, 44% of organizations planned to begin SSE implementation with ZTNA. 

By 2025, this percentage had risen to 46%, reinforcing the notion that VPN-based access control is becoming obsolete. 

The 2025 report also highlights real-world breaches, such as the MGM Resorts cyberattack, emphasizing the urgency of continuous authentication and identity-driven access controls.

SSE and SASE Adoption Trends

One of the most notable differences between the two reports is the acceleration of SSE adoption. In 2024, 69% of organizations planned to implement SSE within the next 24 months. 

By 2025, this figure had jumped to 79%, reflecting increased urgency in transitioning away from legacy security models. 

Additionally, the importance of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is growing, with 62% of organizations in 2025 considering it a key strategic initiative, compared to 59% in 2024.

Shifting SSE Architecture Preferences

In 2024, 65% of organizations preferred an SSE solution leveraging public cloud providers. 

By 2025, this preference had risen to 70%, with a notable increase in organizations favoring a hybrid model that combines public cloud and vendor-owned data centers. 

This shift highlights the industry’s movement toward scalable, high-performance cloud security while maintaining control over specific compliance and regulatory needs.

Challenges in Implementation and Security Confidence

Confidence in security teams’ ability to protect workforce access remained a concern across both reports. In 2024, only 33% of organizations expressed high confidence in their security measures. 

The 2025 report provides a more quantified insight, reporting an average confidence score of 6.8 out of 10, indicating some improvement but still revealing concerns over fragmented security tools and policy enforcement. 

Visibility into access activities is another ongoing challenge, with confidence in monitoring employee access scoring 5.3/10 in 2025 and confidence in tracking third-party users even lower at 4.9/10.

Reducing Reliance on Legacy Security Appliances

Organizations continue to migrate away from legacy security appliances in favor of SSE. In 2024, 66% of respondents wanted to replace VPN concentrators with SSE, and by 2025, 62% confirmed active plans to eliminate them. 

Additionally, organizations increasingly seek to reduce reliance on SSL inspection appliances, DDoS protection, and firewalls, signaling a broader shift toward cloud-delivered security frameworks.

Strategic Shifts in SSE Deployment

Both reports highlight the importance of selecting the right entry point for SSE adoption. In 2024, Zero Trust security was the most common starting point, with ZTNA adoption leading at 44%. 

By 2025, this increased slightly to 46%, but Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) adoption also showed gradual shifts, reflecting a more balanced approach to securing different access points.

Budget and Investment Trends

Security budgets remained relatively stable across both years, though there were slight changes in expectations. In 2024, 47% of organizations planned budget increases for security initiatives. 

The 2025 report shows a slight decline, with 43% expecting increased budgets while 46% anticipate flat spending. 

This suggests that while SSE remains a priority, organizations are optimizing spending rather than drastically expanding investments.

Role of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)

The importance of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) in SSE solutions has increased significantly. In 2024, DEM was recognized as a valuable but secondary feature. 

By 2025, 93% of respondents considered DEM crucial, with 33% rating it as very important. 

This reflects a growing awareness that security should not hinder user productivity and that monitoring user experience is essential to maintaining performance.

Consolidation of Security Tools

The reports indicate that organizations are moving toward consolidating security tools into unified SSE frameworks. In 2024, 73% of organizations used three or more security solutions, leading to policy management complexity. 

By 2025, 74% continued using multiple tools, but the report emphasizes the increasing shift toward integrating SSE, SWG, CASB, and ZTNA into a single platform to reduce administrative overhead and security silos.

SASE Deployment Strategies

The 2025 report reveals a stronger inclination toward single-vendor SASE adoption, with 61% of organizations preferring a unified solution over multi-vendor approaches. 

This is a direct response to the fragmentation challenges identified in 2024, where security teams struggled with managing multiple disconnected tools. 

Key Takeaways and Future Trends

• Faster SSE adoption: The percentage of organizations planning to implement SSE within 24 months rose from 69% in 2024 to 79% in 2025.
• Zero Trust momentum: Adoption of ZTNA as the starting point for SSE continues to rise, reaching 46% in 2025.
• Cloud-first security preference: More organizations (70% in 2025) favor public cloud-based SSE architectures for scalability and resilience.
• Greater emphasis on user experience: DEM adoption surged in 2025, with 93% recognizing its role in maintaining productivity.
• Budget stabilization: While investments in SSE continue, organizations are focusing on optimizing spending rather than significantly increasing budgets.
• Security tool consolidation: The trend toward single-vendor SASE solutions reflects a need for simplified management and integrated security controls.

Conclusion

The transition from the 2024 to the 2025 SSE Adoption Reports illustrates an accelerated shift toward cloud-first security, Zero Trust principles, and integrated SASE frameworks. 

While challenges such as visibility gaps, security confidence, and implementation complexities persist, organizations prioritize SSE as the foundation for modern cybersecurity strategies. 

The trend toward single-vendor solutions, increased DEM adoption, and the steady phasing out of legacy security appliances indicate a maturing approach to secure access that aligns with the evolving cyber threat landscape. 

Moving forward, organizations will need to focus on seamless integration, policy consistency, and user experience optimization to fully realize the benefits of SSE and SASE.

 

The post The Rise of SSE and SASE: What’s Changed from 2024 to 2025? first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

The post The Rise of SSE and SASE: What’s Changed from 2024 to 2025? appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

from Cybersecurity Insiders https://ift.tt/qLU9ctM
via IFTTT

For those unfamiliar with World Cloud Security Day, here’s a brief yet essential overview. Celebrated annually on April 3rd, this day serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of implementing strong security measures to combat the rising cyber threats targeting cloud infrastructure. With cybercriminals becoming more sophisticated, ensuring data security, integrity, and privacy has never been more critical.

The Rising Cybersecurity Challenges in the Cloud

A recent survey by Rapid7 highlights the increasing cybersecurity risks faced by the cloud industry, particularly the surge in ransomware attacks and data breaches. One of the key reasons behind this growing vulnerability is the misconception among organizations—many believe that securing cloud applications and data is solely the responsibility of the service provider, leaving customers with little or no role in the process.

This misunderstanding often results in lax security practices, such as failing to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) or encryption. Many users assume that once a contract or a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is signed with a cloud service provider (CSP), the security of their digital assets is fully managed by the provider. However, this false sense of security creates an opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities.

The Role of AI-Powered Cyber Attacks

Hackers are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks at an unprecedented scale. With AI-driven hacking tools, cybercriminals can launch multiple attack attempts in an automated and rapid manner, increasing their success rate to over 60%. This growing technological gap between attackers and defenders emphasizes the urgent need for proactive cloud security measures.

The Significance of World Cloud Security Day

Events like World Cloud Security Day play a vital role in spreading awareness about the shared responsibility model in cloud security. While CSPs implement security frameworks and provide protective measures, customers must actively secure their data and applications stored or accessed on cloud platforms.

To strengthen cloud security, organizations should adopt a multi-layered security approach, including:

Zero Trust Architecture – Never trust, always verify. Restrict access based on strict identity verification.

AI-Driven Threat Detection – Utilize artificial intelligence to detect, analyze, and respond to cyber threats in real-time.

Regulatory Compliance – Follow industry standards such as GDPR, CCPA, and ISO 27001 to ensure data protection and compliance.

Final Thoughts

With cloud computing becoming the backbone of modern digital infrastructure, robust security strategies are non-negotiable. World Cloud Security Day serves as a reminder that safeguarding cloud assets requires a collaborative effort—both from service providers and customers. By embracing advanced security frameworks and proactive risk management, we can create a resilient cloud ecosystem that stands strong against evolving cyber threats.

The post Data Breaches and ransomware remain top concerns on World Cloud Security Day first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

The post Data Breaches and ransomware remain top concerns on World Cloud Security Day appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

from Cybersecurity Insiders https://ift.tt/VZLz59Q
via IFTTT

Managing secrets, the API keys, authentication tokens, and encryption credentials that keep our applications securely running is a critical yet increasingly complex challenge in modern enterprises. Organizations use secret management tools like AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, and Azure Key Vault to protect sensitive access credentials. 

As businesses expand, particularly through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), they very often inherit multiple overlapping secret managers, creating hidden security and operational risks.

While redundancy might seem like a safeguard, in reality, managing secrets for mission-critical applications through multiple vaulting tools introduces security gaps, operational inefficiencies, and compliance challenges. 

A 2024 industry survey from CyberArk and GitGuardian found that the typical enterprise had at least six different secret management solutions in place. The larger the company, the more widespread and complex this problem of ‘vault sprawl’ inevitably becomes. As with any problem, the first step to addressing the issue is understanding how teams get here. 

Why Do Enterprises Use Multiple Secret Managers?

In an ideal world, every company would standardize on a single platform for secrets management. They need a way to safely store any credential, encrypted at rest, that can be programmatically called when needed throughout the software development lifecycle. These systems also offer insight into the non-human identity lifecycle, helping teams track when a secret was added and, importantly, rotated. Any good system will offer logs and make managing secrets a streamlined process. 

For small companies without many products or offerings, getting everything in one place is a realistic goal, especially if standardized on a single cloud platform, like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. All of these platforms offer secret management services like Azure KeyVault or AWS Secrets Manager.

As new projects are launched and companies continue to grow, they often adopt a multi-cloud strategy, introducing new secrets and management needs. In some cases, moving certain services to on-premise operations makes the most sense, meaning they end up in hybrid environments. Just the built-in tools can no longer handle secrets management, and it is at this stage of maturity that we see the adoption of enterprise secret management systems, such as HashiCorp Vault or CyberArk Conjur.

Merging Complex Organizations Amplifies Secret Management Risks

Standardizing on a single platform with any central planning is hard enough in a single organization with a shared culture and mission. What happens when a completely different organization is added to the mix and needs to be accounted for? 

This happens quite a lot.

According to research from PwC, approximately 50,000 merger and acquisition (M&A) deals were announced in 2024. 

Let’s assume that the company initiating the merger has an average of six vault solutions deployed, and the company being acquired is fairly small and only has two secret management platforms. The newly combined organization will then have eight systems to contend with overnight. That may sound manageable, but remember, secrets management is only one security consideration that this M&S activity brings. 

For very large organizations that acquire multiple companies a year, the problem of secrets to manage becomes exponential rather than linear. 

Operational Overhead And Complexity

The larger the organization, however, the more likely that multiple divisions and teams will have spun up their own instance of their secrets vaulting solution of choice. Even if the organization is standardized on a single tooling choice, the likelihood that there is one, and only one, centrally managed enterprise instance of the technology is very unlikely. With multiple secret managers in play, different teams may store and manage the same secrets separately, leading to:

• Duplicated effort in storing, rotating, and auditing credentials
• Confusing access control policies across departments
• Delayed developer workflows due to integration issues

Cost is also a major concern with vault sprawl. As with any technology, the more of it you deploy, the higher your overall operational expenses are going to rise. Enterprise secrets management systems are a mission-critical infrastructure investment, costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to license and operate. Having duplicate systems means paying that same fee through multiple contracts and, most likely, to multiple vendors. 

Risks From Secrets Redundancy

Fragmented secret management landscape is the reality of large enterprise and it increases the risk of orphaned or forgotten secrets. A 2023 study found that 90% of valid secrets detected remained active 5 days later, highlighting remediation as a challenge. 

Different secret managers enforce security policies unevenly. One tool may require monthly secret rotation, while another allows long-lived credentials indefinitely, creating compliance risks.

More systems mean more potential entry points for attackers. Each secret manager requires its own access controls, monitoring, and security patches. Security teams must learn and work with multiple platforms, increasing training costs and operational risk. Misconfigurations in just one of these tools can expose sensitive secrets.

There are also risks introduced as organizations attempt to manually solve the vault sprawl issue through the migration of secrets. When passing secrets between systems, secrets often get copied into temporary repositories or spreadsheets, increasing exposure risks. Anytime a person can read a secret in plaintext, that means there is a clear and simple attack path open to anyone who gains access to your internal environments. 

Multiple secret managers complicate audits and regulatory adherence. Regulations like GDPR and NIST standards require strict control over credentials and access logs, which become harder to enforce across disparate tools. When an auditor comes to your door, you do not want that to be the time you start trying to consolidate systems for visibility. 

Mitigating Vault Sprawl

With so many drawbacks and risks associated with vault sprawl, it is clear that security and IT leaders must work together to gain visibility into all the secrets throughout the enterprise. Addressing the existing complexity by gaining real-time visibility into the state of your secrets, how they are used, and when they need to be rotated, no matter where they are stored is the way forward. 

Secrets Discovery Is The Needed First Step

Teams should first focus on discovering secrets throughout all environments, including all secret managers, rather than trying to manage the mass migration of credentials between cloud and enterprise solutions.

Taking a visibility and discovery-focused approach will also help you find all the secrets not currently stored in vaults, helping you enforce standardization of secrets management. Without knowing about a secret, it will be impossible to ensure it is properly rotated or taken out of service when no longer needed. Long-lived “zombie credentials” are one of an attacker’s favorite paths.  

Automating Vault Consolidation

With the proper secrets detection tooling, enterprises can find redundancies as well, which can lead to lower operational costs and overhead. For example, if you find the same secret across multiple vaults, only one would be needed. Development teams lack this high-level insight. 

Doing this process manually is time and cost-prohibitive, especially when there are thousands of valid secrets in play. The larger the organization, the more automation is required. Detection solutions need to be addressable with scripting and automation tooling. If a script can open a pull request to update the code to call the correct vault, which already contains the needed secret, then the review process for merging that change should be seconds, not days of developer rework. 

Security can also help developers by investing in tools that can detect plaintext secrets before they leave the developer’s machine. Ideally any time a developer needs to invoke a new secret, their tooling should guide them down the proper path with the right documentation or even the automation to suggest the actual correct calls into the secrets management system. 

Prioritizing Secrets Management In The Enterprise At Scale

Addressing vault sprawl is not just a matter of convenience; it is a critical security and operational challenge that enterprises must proactively manage, especially as mergers and acquisitions continue to drive IT complexity. The costs are high, both from a financial perspective, as paying for redundant systems, and from an overhead perspective, requiring more time and effort from your already stretched teams to keep up with multiple platforms. 

The rapid accumulation of secret management tools across different business units creates unnecessary overhead, increases security blind spots, and elevates the risk of exposure due to inconsistent policies. While complete consolidation is often unrealistic in larger organizations, enterprises must prioritize visibility, standardization, and automation to mitigate these risks. 

By implementing robust discovery processes, enforcing uniform secret management policies, and leveraging automation to streamline migration and enforcement, organizations can ensure that secrets remain secure, auditable, and manageable at scale. As cyber threats evolve and businesses grow, security teams must take a proactive stance in managing secrets, turning what was once a hidden risk into a well-governed and resilient security practice.

__

Author BIO

Dwayne McDaniel – Senior Developer Advocate at GitGuardian

Dwayne has been working as a Developer Advocate since 2014 and has been involved in tech communities since 2005. His entire mission is to “help people figure stuff out.” He loves sharing his knowledge, and he has done so by giving talks at hundreds of events worldwide. He has been fortunate enough to speak at institutions like MIT and Stanford and internationally in Paris and Iceland. Dwayne currently lives in Chicago.

 

The post Dealing With Merger and Acquisition Driven Vault Sprawl: The Hidden Risks Of Multiple Secret Managers in Large Enterprises first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

The post Dealing With Merger and Acquisition Driven Vault Sprawl: The Hidden Risks Of Multiple Secret Managers in Large Enterprises appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

from Cybersecurity Insiders https://ift.tt/CFeGiHk
via IFTTT