Key Topics:

✅ How the Identity Fabric is used in practice: maturity assessments, gap analyses, roadmaps, and tool selection
✅ Why the right order always goes capabilities → services → tools — never the other way around
✅ What happens when tools are used for things they were never meant to do
✅ Why organizing teams around capabilities — not tools — is the future of IT operations
✅ The Identity Fabric built for 2040: long-term thinking in a fast-moving market
✅ How the fabric absorbs buzzwords like IVIP, ISPM, and ITDR — and why that proves the concept

🧵 "Every second day someone comes up with a new buzzword, the Identity Fabric helps you strip it down to capabilities and ask: is there really something new here?" Martin Kuppinger on why structured thinking beats buzzword bingo.

Figure 1: KuppingerCole Reference Architecture highlighting IGA-related capabilities

Modern enterprise environments are dynamic, context-driven and seek almost real-time governance capabilities. Also, organizations now manage identities across complex hybrid environments such as cloud platforms, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, business systems, and developer environments. Workforce represents only one category of current landscape of identities. Contractors, partners, and Non-Human Identities (NHIs) such as APIs, service accounts, bots, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly becoming an integral part of business processes.

The scale of this shift is easy to underestimate until it is made concrete. Rubrik Zero Labs' 2025 research puts the ratio of non-human to human identities at 82 to 1 in the modern enterprise, and the same research found that 89% of organizations have already fully or partially incorporated AI agents into their identity infrastructure, with another 10% planning to.

In other words, the NHI-heavy environment is not an edge case reserved for cloud-native shops; it is close to universal. When machine identities outnumber people by that margin, "who has access to what" stops being a JML question and becomes a continuous data-correlation problem.

Identity Data Correlation and Continuous Reconciliation

Most modern organizations understand that access should be governed consistently even when identity information originates from multiple authoritative sources. The difficult part is establishing a reliable picture of “who has access to what” or “who granted that access”, across the entire IT environment.

The challenge has expanded from provisioning users into application to correlating thousands of accounts, resolving ownership, reconciling entitlements, and maintaining an accurate inventory as environments continuously change. Governance decisions can become increasingly complex when handling these different scenarios at the same time. Access reviews require context, lifecycle automation needs to be consistent, and risk assessments need complete information for optimal decision making.

This is why modern IGA platforms increasingly position identity correlation and continuous reconciliation as core capabilities rather than background processes.

Lifecycle management needs to cover wide range of identity types

The concept of identity lifecycle management has expanded well beyond employees. While workforce identities still follow relatively predictable onboarding and offboarding processes, NHIs such as service accounts, APIs, containers, automation scripts, and AI agents are created through development pipelines and infrastructure automation rather than HR systems. The identities are ephemeral and need constant governance.

The cost of getting this wrong compounds over time. GitGuardian's 2026 research on exposed credentials found that 64% of secrets that were valid in 2022 remain exploitable today, nearly four years later. Ungoverned NHIs do not just accumulate; they persist, quietly, long after anyone remembers why they were created.

As a result, traditional workforce-centric lifecycle models are no longer sufficient. Organizations increasingly expect IGA platforms to govern both human and NHIs consistently through flexible lifecycle policies, continuous reconciliation, and clear ownership models. The focus is shifting to applying a unified governance model across all identities.

Governance is shifting to continuous evaluation

Access certifications remain an essential governance control, particularly for regulated industries. However, reviewing thousands of entitlements is difficult to justify when access changes every day. Instead of certifying every entitlement equally, reviews increasingly focus on higher-risk scenarios, unusual access patterns, privileged permissions, or changes triggered by lifecycle events.

Rather than relying exclusively on scheduled certification campaigns, organizations increasingly expect continuous monitoring, event-driven reviews, and policy enforcement that reacts to changes as they occur. This continuous, event-driven posture echoes the logic underpinning  Zero Trust architectures: access is not a status to certify periodically, it is a condition to verify constantly.

Access intelligence is becoming the real differentiator

Provisioning, approval workflows, and role management have become mature capabilities across the IGA market. So, the area where vendors increasingly differentiate themselves is access intelligence. The goal is not replacing governance decisions with AI. Instead, analytics provides additional evidence that allows reviewers, administrators, and auditors to make more informed decisions while reducing unnecessary manual effort.

Organizations want governance decisions supported by context rather than static policies alone. Machine learning (ML) models are now being applied to identify dormant accounts, detect anomalous access, recommend entitlements, optimize role models, and highlight unusual permission combinations. These capabilities are particularly valuable because entitlement structures continue to grow more complex. Access intelligence is gradually moving from optional enhancement to expected functionality.

What’s next for IGA

The next generation of IGA is gradually evolving toward continuous reconciliation, event-driven lifecycle management, contextual risk analysis, and governance that extends equally across human identities and NHIs.

This episode of the Analyst Chat dives into a deeper discussion of these dynamics:

Zero Trust Platforms are emerging as a response to this fragmentation. Their promise is not simply another access product, but a unified policy, context, and enforcement fabric spanning users, devices, workloads, APIs, service accounts, and increasingly AI agents. This Leadership Compass examines how this market is converging, which capabilities now define platform maturity, and where architectural substance ends and Zero Trust branding begins.

Join Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst & CTO at KuppingerCole Analysts, for a practical walkthrough of the Leadership Compass on Zero Trust Platforms. The session traces how the market has evolved from VPN replacement and point enforcement toward a broader platform category, and what this shift means for buyers trying to rationalize overlapping access, segmentation, and policy tools. Alexei will outline the capabilities that now define leadership in this market and provide a pragmatic test for separating platforms with real architectural depth from products that have simply inherited the Zero Trust vocabulary.

Chris Webber, VP of Product Marketing at Teleport, brings a practitioner’s perspective on identity-centric security and modern infrastructure access. Having worked at companies such as Zscaler, Centrify, and Styra (creators of Open Policy Agent), he will share practical insights on applying Zero Trust principles with a focus on unified policy and modern identity environments.

This is a question worth addressing here because it is no longer optional.

Your Best Defense Was Nobody Bothering

Something uncomfortable often underlies identity environments. What protects your over-privileged service accounts and your long-lived secrets is very often not consistently enforced policy. It is effort. These weaknesses have sat there for years without being exploited, and not because they were well hidden. Many are perfectly visible to anyone who knows where to look. The more mundane reason is that reviewing a large, sprawling estate took skilled human time, and that time was always expensive and finite.

Call it security by effort. Protection that works because breaking it costs more than it returns. Nobody chose it. It accumulated, one deferred review at a time, and it held for exactly as long as the effort stayed expensive.

In June, that assumption came apart. A new AI model arrived from a capability tier its maker had judged too dangerous in cybersecurity to release without additional safeguards. Within three days a US export-control order took it offline worldwide. By the end of the month the controls had been lifted again. The capability at the center of it is almost banal. Point the model at a codebase and have it find the flaws. That is automated vulnerability discovery, and much the same capability now sits inside other AI models. Which one hardly matters. The effort is no longer expensive.

One challenge for us as humans: NIS2 and DORA can force documentation and accountability. Neither creates real urgency. Automated vulnerability discovery does. Assume attackers can now afford to go looking.

The Part Nobody Put On a Slide: Our Current Security Measures Are at Least One Step Behind

The safest place to start is at the resource, the database, the API, the queue itself, not at a gateway somewhere in front of it. Check it there and a request has to prove it is allowed the moment it arrives, no matter which account it claims to come from. That is the check that still fires when a service account nobody wrote down starts pulling data, and in an estate this size something eventually does. Listing every non-human identity with an owner and an expiry date is worth doing too, but the list is always behind, because these accounts appear faster than anyone maintains the record. The list tells you which identities existed the last time someone checked. Enforcement at the resource covers the one making a call right now.

From there, the work moves to the credentials themselves. Long-lived static keys and service-account passwords sit at the root of most machine-identity risk, and every new agent built on an old secret inherits that exposure. The trend is moving away from permanent credentials and towards temporary, purpose-specific ones. If a team wants to make immediate progress, the most useful step is often the least sophisticated. Find the oldest, most forgotten secret in the estate, whether it is a password last rotated years ago or a vault entry that still belongs to someone who left, and retire it.

The harder shift has little to do with tooling and everything to do with habit. When an agent needs to act, the reflex is to hand it the credential. But handing a non-deterministic actor a raw token means handing over all that authority at once. The more defensible arrangement keeps the credential with a system that carries out the action on the agent's behalf, and lets the agent ask only for narrow, specific operations. Once you control what an agent can actually reach, meaning its resources, its tokens and its tools, the question of what a compromised or misbehaving agent might do becomes far easier to contain. Catalogue your agents and secure the vaults and the tools they depend on.

Authorization itself must change shape. The familiar approach, authorize once at the perimeter and then trust the session, does not survive chains of agents calling one another at machine speed. It must become continuous instead, evaluated at every step and carrying the human intent behind a request through the whole chain. At least the last part is still an open problem, and the standards for passing intent cleanly from one agent to the next are only now taking shape. Without it, one question has no answer. Who delegated what to whom, for what purpose, and under whose authority?

You Already Know Most of the Tools, and Now It Is Time to Use Them

Strip away the vocabulary of autonomous agents and the shape of the problem is recognizable. Discovery, least privilege, short-lived credentials, continuous authorization, lifecycle. What is new is the setting. These are no longer occasional hygiene tasks but controls that must hold for a fast-growing population of autonomous actors operating at machine speed and doing that well is genuinely hard. Few organizations have managed it yet but that is not a reason to wait. It is the reason to start.

What changed in June was not the difficulty of the work but the cost of avoiding it. Nobody invented automated vulnerability discovery. It simply stopped being expensive. The effort that used to keep these gaps quietly out of reach is gone, and it is not coming back.

The organizations that handle the next phase well will not be the ones that found the right AI-native platform to buy. They will be the ones that did the ordinary work properly, early, and turned security by effort into security by design. None of it is glamorous. Do it now, or wait until someone, probably an agent, finds out what you missed. Guess what? It won't tell you first. 

Something similar is happening in SaaS security

For the past five years, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) has been steadily moving along the security racetrack. It emerged to solve problems created by rapid and often poorly managed SaaS application adoption: unsanctioned applications, inconsistent configurations, excessive user permissions, local accounts outside centralized identity systems, and weak visibility into who was using what, to list just some of the issues. These are not minor security issues. They reflect a fundamental loss of control as business units adopted cloud-based applications faster than IT and security teams could secure and govern them. 

SSPM helped organizations regain some of that control. It provided security teams with better ways to discover SaaS applications, monitor configuration hygiene, identify risky permissions, and reduce SaaS-related identity and access weaknesses. Those requirements have not gone away. Organizations still need to know whether critical SaaS applications are configured securely, whether administrators are overprivileged, whether local accounts bypass their identity provider, and whether posture drift is creating new exposures. 

But the race has changed. 

The faster class of AI security and governance has now entered the track and is setting the pace for the combined new market category of SaaS Security and AI Governance. AI governance is not replacing SSPM. Rather, it is accelerating the need for a broader control plane that includes traditional SSPM but also extends well beyond it into AI. 

The reason is straightforward: enterprise AI adoption is following many of the same decentralized processes that created shadow SaaS. Employees are using public AI tools directly from browsers. Business teams are enabling SaaS-native copilots. Developers are connecting AI agents into broader business workflows. Users are granting OAuth access to AI-enabled applications. Increasingly, personal agents and automation tools are being deployed without formal IT onboarding or security review.

Shadow AI is now the next phase of shadow IT

The result is that the SaaS risk surface is no longer limited to applications, configurations, and human users. It now includes embedded AI, shadow AI, AI agents, OAuth integrations, non-human identities, SaaS-to-SaaS connections, sensitive data exposure, and active threats. That is why SaaS application configuration hygiene, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient as the organizing idea for this market.

From SSPM to SaaS Security and AI Governance

Buyers now need to ask broader questions:

• Which SaaS and AI applications are in use?
• Who or what has access?
• What user permissions exist?
• What data is reachable?
• Which integrations are trusted?
• Which tokens are persistent?
• Where is risky behavior emerging?
• Where is there evidence of active threats? 

AI agents raise the stakes because they can operate with delegated authority, interact across multiple systems, retrieve data, and act at machine speed. Even when an agent does not have administrative privileges, it may still have enough access to create material risk. It may summarize sensitive content, move data into another system, trigger workflows, or act through permissions granted to a user, service account, or connected application. 

OAuth and SaaS-to-SaaS integrations add even more security exposures. Modern SaaS environments are surrounded by marketplace apps, automation platforms, API-driven workflows, copilots, and third-party integrations. These connections may hold tokens, inherit user permissions, synchronize sensitive data, or create indirect access paths into critical business systems. A connected application does not need to be malicious to be dangerous. It can simply be overprivileged, abandoned, poorly monitored, unsanctioned, or under the control of a threat actor. 

Data exposure adds further overall enterprise risk. As AI becomes embedded into SaaS workflows, the key question is not only which application is being used. It is what data that application, model, agent, integration, or user can reach. Sensitive data can be placed into prompts, retrieved by copilots, summarized by agents, exposed through public links, or moved through automated workflows. This makes data reachability, sharing exposure, permission context, and activity monitoring central to SaaS and AI governance. 

For buyers, the conclusion is not to discard SSPM requirements. It is to expand on them. SaaS discovery, configuration monitoring, and posture management remain foundational. But these now need to be complemented by identity posture, OAuth risk management, AI agent visibility, SaaS-to-SaaS integration risk, data exposure management, threat detection, remediation workflows, audit reporting, and cost governance. 

In multi-class racing, the slower classes still matter, but the faster classes change the rhythm and strategy of the entire race. SSPM is still on the track. It remains a necessary class of controls. But AI governance has become the lead driver accelerating adoption of a broader SaaS Security and AI Governance market. 

Stay tuned for the upcoming release of our brand-new Leadership Compass on SaaS Security and AI Governance.

Key Topics:

✅ Why zero trust is a strategy, not a product — and what that means for procurement
✅ The four non-negotiable requirements for a real Zero Trust Platform
✅ What separates a genuine platform from a collection of tools with a zero trust label
✅ NHIs, AI agents, and data protection as the new frontiers of zero trust architecture
✅ Three critical questions every RFP for a ZTP should include

🔐 "Stop looking for a Zero Trust Platform" - yes, really. Alexei Balaganski explains why that mindset shift is the most important thing a CISO can do before opening a single RFP.

📊 The KuppingerCole Analysts Zero Trust Platform Buyers Compass and Leadership Compass are both published: watch this episode first, then dive into the research.

In this episode of The CISO Perspective, Berthold Kerl speaks with Roberto De Paolis, Head of Digital Security and Security Operations at Leonardo, the global aerospace, defense, and cyber company. Roberto brings a practitioner's view from one of Europe's most complex security environments, defending a critical infrastructure provider operating across defense, aerospace, and industrial sectors simultaneously.

The conversation covers the four attack trends currently reshaping the threat landscape, how AI is lowering the cost and raising the sophistication of offensive operations, the challenge of applying Zero Trust to OT environments with decades of legacy infrastructure, and why European cyber sovereignty requires more than regulation. It requires coordinated investment and shared technology.

Roberto also addresses a question security leaders rarely discuss openly: the ethics of using offensive AI techniques defensively, and where the boundaries should be.

Topics covered: AI-powered attacks, Zero Trust, OT/ICS security, supply chain threats, European cyber sovereignty, cloud data sovereignty, SOC automation, ethics of defensive AI.

Most security incidents do not begin at the login screen. They begin much later, when an identity has authenticated once and keeps its access long after the reason for it has disappeared. Standing access is the liability almost no one measures. Employees keep permissions from projects that ended years ago. Service accounts reach systems no one remembers connecting. API keys sit in config files, valid until someone notices, which is usually never.

For the longest time, this was still manageable. People log in a few times a day, act at human speed, and usually leave a trail someone can reconstruct later. Software acting on our behalf changes the equation. An Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent can operate continuously, across systems, through credentials scattered across code, pipelines, vaults, and SaaS tools.

Authentication tells you who the agent claims to be but does not tell you what the agent should be allowed to touch, why, or for how long. That is the problem 1Password has now decided to address, with an acquisition reportedly valued well above $200 million.

What 1Password did

When 1Password introduced Unified Access in March 2026, the strategic direction was already clear: access, not authentication, was becoming the control point for humans, machines, and agents. What was less clear was how much runtime enforcement the platform could actually provide.

The more recent announcements answer that question only partially, but they make the missing piece visible. 1Password acquired Apono, a cloud-native just-in-time (JIT) access governance platform, and launched Credential Broker into private beta. These two announcements are closely related, but they are not interchangeable. They address different layers of the same access problem.

Credential Broker covers credential delivery: where secrets live, how they are retrieved, how they are injected into workflows, and how organizations can stop hardcoding them into automation, scripts, repositories, pipelines, and local developer environments. Its first private beta use case, GitHub Actions, is still quite narrow but shows the direction of future development. CI/CD workflows are exactly where long-lived secrets, excessive permissions, and developer convenience tend to reinforce each other.

Apono addresses runtime authorization. Once an identity has received access, what can it actually do, under which conditions, with whose approval, and for how long? This is where JIT access, zero standing privilege (ZSP), approval workflows, session controls, and auditability become central. Apono is less about protecting the credential itself and more about governing the entitlement that credential enables.

Credential Broker helps prevent credentials from being scattered, copied, embedded, and forgotten. Apono helps prevent access from becoming broad, persistent, and detached from business need. One is about delivering secrets safely while the other makes access conditional, temporary, and observable at runtime.

The vault is still the company’s original foundation, but 1Password’s ambition is no longer simply to store credentials securely. It is to decide when credentials should be released, what access they should enable, what the identity may do with that access, and when the permission should disappear again.

Credential security and access governance have been treated as separate disciplines for too long. In an agentic environment, that separation becomes a liability. An AI agent does not care whether the risk came from a leaked token, an overprivileged service account, or an approval workflow that granted too much access for too long. It only needs enough authority to wreak havoc at machine speed.

Credential Broker and Apono are therefore not just two product additions. They are the two sides of the runtime access layer the Unified Access narrative was missing in March.

Why access, not login, is the control point

For most of its history, enterprise identity centered on authentication: create the account, verify the login, provision access, deprovision on exit. The workflow was built around the moment of entry, because for human users that was where the interesting decisions usually happened.

Agents work differently: they act after entry, continuously and at machine speed. They chain actions together, cross system boundaries, and use delegated authority in ways no one fully anticipated when the session opened. A permission that looked reasonable at login can become excessive a minute later, when the agent reaches into a system it was never meant to touch. Point-in-time authorization cannot see that happen, let alone stop it.

“Who is allowed in” is no longer the right question to ask. We need to know what identity is allowed to do once inside, whether the permission still makes sense, and whether it should still exist a second later.

This is the shift from Zero Trust as a slogan to Zero Trust as an operating model, where enforcement follows the identity into every action. The agentic version is even sharper because agents act through APIs, with delegated authority, at a volume conventional controls were never built to police. This is the broader argument I make in Leadership Compass Zero Trust Platforms and No API Security, No AI Security. 1Password is making the right call: runtime access, not the login event, is becoming the control point for agentic work.

From vault to access platform

As a company that already holds credentials, secrets, and developer workflows, 1Password has a strong starting point for broader identity security. The vault is not enough to make it an enterprise access platform, but it is a powerful foundation from which to try. Its strength has always been usability, and that matters more than enterprise identity vendors sometimes like to admit. A security control no one wants to use is usually something people quietly work around.

The challenge is that enterprise identity security is not just a usability problem. It is also an architecture problem, an integration problem, but most of all an organizational problem. Identity, security, DevOps, and engineering teams all look at access from different angles. A vault gives 1Password a strong point of entry, but the enterprise narrative must extend beyond secure storage into policy, enforcement, audit, governance, and operational fit.

That was the open question in March. Unified Access pointed in the right direction, but the runtime layer was still more implied than delivered. Apono gives 1Password a credible answer to what happens after a credential is released and after an identity enters a system. Whether that answer becomes an integrated enterprise platform is still a separate question.

Unified is still a claim about the future

The word doing the heavy lifting in “Unified Access” is unified. It is also the part still coming together, since customers cannot yet buy the pieces as one integrated platform.

The pieces sit at very different stages. Enterprise Password Manager is established. SaaS Manager is real and growing. Device Trust has been in the portfolio since 2024. Credential Broker is in private beta and starts with GitHub Actions. Apono has only just arrived inside the company, with deeper integration still ahead. The two building blocks carrying most of the agentic runtime story are also the least mature pieces inside the 1Password platform.

The harder part is that credential delivery and runtime authorization have to converge in practice. Credential Broker cannot remain only a safer way to retrieve secrets, and Apono cannot remain only a JIT access layer beside the vault. The value of Unified Access depends on making both layers part of the same policy decision: who is asking for access, which credential is being requested, what task it supports, what the identity can do once inside, when access expires, and what evidence is produced afterward. A portfolio can contain a vault, a broker, a SaaS visibility tool, device trust, and JIT access. A platform has to make those components behave like one control plane.

Read generously, 1Password saw a gap in its own roadmap and moved decisively. Read skeptically, a core capability is now being positioned as central to the strategy just weeks after arriving through acquisition. Both readings can be true. That is what makes the move interesting.

The most crowded corner in identity

1Password is entering one of the most crowded market segments of identity security, and it has arrived at the same conclusion at almost the same moment as its competitors.

CrowdStrike is talking about Continuous Identity for AI Agents, real-time authorization, removal of standing privileges, and delegation chains. SailPoint is positioning Agentic Fabric around agent ownership and ZSP models. Delinea bought StrongDM for a similar reason.

Even the vocabulary is converging: zero standing privilege, just-in-time access, unified control plane, humans, machines, agents. When every vendor uses the same labels in the same quarter, the labels stop carrying information. The only useful question is what sits underneath them.

1Password’s advantage is the vault, the developer footprint, and the everyday usability that many enterprise incumbents still struggle to match. It starts close to where credentials are created, stored, shared, and quietly misused. That gives it a credible path from human access to delegated agent access, especially in developer workflows where agents, automation, and secrets already collide.

What it does not have is uniqueness. Several competitors now have defensible foundations of their own, whether they start from privileged access management, identity governance and administration, endpoint security, identity threat detection and response, or continuous authorization. 1Password is not the only vendor building this, but it may have one of the strongest starting points where developers and agents already work.

Where the pitch gets ahead of the product

Apono’s intent-based access model asks an agent to state, in natural language, why it needs access, then compares that declared intent against what the agent actually does. If the behavior diverges, access can be narrowed or revoked.

Conceptually, this is where agent governance has to go. In practice, it depends on reliably characterizing the intent of a non-deterministic system and detecting drift without a lot of false positives. That is an exceptionally hard problem, and no vendor has cracked it reliably at scale yet.

Tying an agent’s access to the human who authorized it, scoped to a task, is the delegated identity model the industry is rapidly converging on. It is also easier to describe than to implement. It raises uncomfortable operational questions. What happens when the delegating human’s own access changes mid-task? What happens when an agent calls another agent? Where is the chain anchored, how is it verified, and who can revoke it?

Both claims run into the credential and protocol layer where agents connect to tools, the surface examined in Model Context Protocol, and both sit on top of the non-human identity problem charted in From Machine Identity to Agentic AI. These are not objections to the model. They are the conditions under which the model becomes real.

The work that starts after the deal

Access, not authentication, is becoming the control point for agentic work. 1Password has identified that shift correctly, and with Apono it has bought the runtime access layer it was missing.

However, the market will not wait while 1Password turns multiple products into one platform. Larger and better-resourced competitors are assembling versions of the same model, often with deeper roots in privileged access, identity governance, endpoint security, or continuous authorization. 1Password’s advantage is real but narrow enough to erode if integration stalls.

The move from storing credentials to governing access is the right one. Whether 1Password can turn it into a defensible enterprise position depends on making the vault, Credential Broker, Apono, SaaS Manager, and Device Trust behave like one system before the market decides that someone else already solved the problem.

Recent geopolitical developments, accelerating investment in artificial intelligence, and increasing concerns over digital sovereignty are driving strong demand for European sovereign cloud infrastructure. At the same time, Europe faces significant structural challenges that could limit its ability to capitalize on this opportunity. The IMF's recent working paper Europe's Productivity Weakness identifies many of the underlying economic factors that continue to constrain Europe's innovation and productivity, several of which apply equally to the sovereign cloud market.

The future success of European sovereign cloud providers will therefore depend not only on growing demand but also on Europe's ability to overcome these structural barriers.

Growth Drivers and Opportunities for EU Sovereign Clouds

The market opportunity for European sovereign cloud has never been greater. Artificial intelligence, geopolitical change and growing strategic investment are converging to create a once-in-a-generation opportunity for European cloud providers to compete on more than trust alone.

1. Generative AI (GenAI) is creating a new cloud market: GenAI is fundamentally changing cloud infrastructure requirements. Unlike previous generations of enterprise software, GenAI requires vast amounts of computing capacity, specialized GPU infrastructure, high-performance networking, and scalable storage. As organizations move from experimentation to production deployment, AI infrastructure is rapidly becoming the next major growth engine for cloud services.
   Forecasts suggest the European AI market will continue to grow at over 40% annually, with the GenAI segment growing even faster. Every new AI application increases demand for cloud-native AI platforms, inference services, vector databases, model hosting, and sovereign AI infrastructure. For European cloud providers, this represents an opportunity to compete in a rapidly expanding market rather than attempting to displace established hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) in traditional infrastructure services.
2. Rising European defense spending: The rapid increase in European defense investment is creating a second major growth opportunity. Defense organizations require sovereign digital infrastructure capable of supporting secure communications, intelligence analysis, autonomous systems, AI-enabled decision support, and classified workloads.
   European initiatives such as ReArm Europe and increasing national defense budgets are accelerating investment in secure digital infrastructure. Sovereign cloud providers can support these requirements through trusted cloud platforms operated under European jurisdiction and aligned with national security requirements.
3. Geopolitical uncertainty: Geopolitical risk has become one of the strongest drivers of sovereign cloud adoption. Growing concerns around the US CLOUD Act, international sanctions, export controls, supply chain disruption, and increasing geopolitical tensions have elevated digital sovereignty from a compliance issue to a board-level strategic consideration.
   Many organizations are now evaluating where their critical applications are hosted, who operates their infrastructure, which legal jurisdictions apply to their data, and how resilient their digital operations would remain during periods of international instability. This shift is expanding demand for cloud services that provide stronger guarantees around legal, operational, and technological sovereignty.
4. Digital supply chain resilience: Modern supply chains depend upon digital infrastructure. Manufacturing, healthcare, utilities, financial services and government all rely upon cloud-based platforms to operate critical business processes.
   As recent geopolitical events have demonstrated, resilience is no longer limited to physical supply chains. Organizations are seeking resilient digital supply chains that minimize dependencies on single providers, foreign jurisdictions, or concentrated technology ecosystems. European sovereign cloud providers can play an important role by providing trusted alternatives that improve operational resilience while reducing strategic dependence on external infrastructure.

Challenges and Structural Restraints

Despite strong market demand, European sovereign cloud providers must overcome structural challenges that have constrained Europe's technology sector for decades.

1. Energy availability: Cloud infrastructure is becoming one of Europe's largest consumers of electricity. Data centers are already estimated to account for approximately 2.5% of EU electricity demand, while countries such as Ireland have seen data centers consume around one-fifth of national electricity production.
   The rapid growth of AI significantly increases these pressures. GPU clusters require substantially more power than traditional cloud infrastructure, creating challenges around electricity availability, grid capacity, sustainability objectives, and planning approval. Access to affordable renewable energy may become one of the limiting factors for Europe's sovereign cloud providers.
2. Lower investment in innovation: Perhaps the most striking observation from the IMF report is the widening innovation gap between Europe and the United States. European technology firms continue to invest significantly less in research and development than their US counterparts. The report notes that R&D expenditure among European listed technology firms has remained around 3–4% of sales, while comparable US firms have increased investment to approximately 12% of sales.
   This innovation gap directly affects the cloud market. Continuous investment is required to develop AI services, automation capabilities, cloud platforms, cybersecurity technologies, and advanced management tools. Without sustained investment, European providers risk falling further behind the innovation cycles established by the US hyperscale CSPs.
3. Market fragmentation: Despite decades of economic integration, Europe remains a fragmented digital market. The IMF argues that European firms continue to operate within a much smaller effective market than their US competitors because regulatory, commercial and operational barriers continue to limit scale.
   This fragmentation affects sovereign cloud providers directly. Different procurement frameworks, regulatory interpretations, national certification schemes, and customer preferences increase operational complexity and reduce economies of scale. Completing Europe's Digital Single Market for cloud services remains one of the most important long-term growth opportunities.
4. Limited market scale: European cloud providers also face a significant scale challenge. While Europe has many capable national and regional cloud providers, none individually approaches the market presence of AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. The largest European provider still represents only a small percentage of the overall European cloud infrastructure market.
   Scale matters because cloud economics increasingly depend upon global infrastructure, AI investment, procurement leverage, software ecosystems and continuous platform innovation. Without greater scale, many European providers may struggle to match the pace of investment required by the AI era.
5. Access to growth capital: The IMF identifies lower levels of equity financing and venture capital investment as another structural weakness within the European economy. Young innovative firms frequently struggle to obtain the funding required to scale rapidly, particularly those investing heavily in intangible assets and advanced technologies.
   These same challenges apply to sovereign cloud providers. Building AI-ready cloud infrastructure requires billions of euros of investment in data centers, GPU clusters, networking, software platforms, and operational capability. Ensuring sufficient access to long-term investment capital will therefore be essential if Europe wishes to build globally competitive sovereign cloud providers.

From Compliance to Competitiveness

The conditions for European sovereign clouds have never been stronger. But demand does not automatically translate into competitive infrastructure.

The opportunity extends well beyond compliance or data residency. Sovereign clouds have the potential to become one of the foundations of Europe's future digital economy, enabling trusted AI adoption, supporting strategic industries, strengthening resilience, and improving long-term productivity. If Europe can combine its regulatory leadership with deeper market integration and increased investment in innovation, sovereign cloud could evolve from a defensive response to geopolitical uncertainty into a powerful engine of European competitiveness and economic growth.

How can European organizations reconcile security imperatives (NIS2) with the adoption of AI while remaining dependent on US hyperscalers? Forum INCYBER and KuppingerCole Analysts invite you to decode the realities of digital autonomy on July 15, 2026 at 5:00 pm (CEST).

Key Topics:

✅ Why the Identity Fabric concept emerged in 2019 — tool sprawl, siloed IAM, and the collapse of the perimeter
✅ What "fabric" actually means: a capability-driven layer connecting all identities to all services
✅ Why capabilities should define tools — not the other way around
✅ How the fabric concept scales to cybersecurity and AI security architectures
✅ The fabric in practice: maturity assessments, requirements analysis, and target operating models
✅ A look ahead to 2040: why the core principles are built to last

"The job of identity management is to provide seamless access for everyone and everything to every service" — seven years on, that definition still holds. Find out why in this episode.

📅 This is the first episode of a new series on the fabric paradigm, covering Identity Fabric, Cybersecurity Fabric, and AI Security Fabric.

I kept returning to that idea throughout the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) in Berlin this May. Identity, in every conversation I had, behaved exactly like Kurzweil's neurons and transistors.

Get the foundational layer right and everything you build on top of it becomes simpler, more durable and more inclusive. Get it wrong, and every subsequent layer inherits the flaw.

Starting With the Basics

Before we can talk sensibly about digital identity, we need to talk about human identity. Not the technical kind, the human kind. It begins with a birth certificate and follows a person through school, work, healthcare, banking, pensions and, eventually, death. It should make no distinction based on where someone was born, what they look like or what they are able to do physically or cognitively. That is the layer everything else sits on.

Once that foundation is solid, the digital layer becomes a natural extension rather than a separate problem to solve. We already have most of the technical tools required. What we lack is agreement on how to assemble them into something people can actually use without thinking too hard about it. Events like EIC exist precisely for that reason: to bring the people who build standards, write policy and design products into the same room so that identity can move from an abstract concept to something consumable.

Making Identity Consumable

Consumers do not wake up wanting a digital identity wallet. They want easier travel, safer banking, faster onboarding and protection from fraud. As John Erik Setsaas, Principal Advisor and Founder at Setsaas Trust Advisory, put it during his session, people do not really care about digital identity. They simply expect to be recognised.

That single observation captures a shift taking place across the whole industry. The conversation is moving away from technical vocabulary such as credentials, wallets and protocols, and towards outcomes: less friction, more trust, portability across borders and resilience in a crisis. Whether it is a European wallet that lets citizens book a hotel or prove a qualification without oversharing personal data, or a system that helps a refugee prove who they are after losing every physical document, the goal is the same. Identity has to disappear into the background of everyday life for it to succeed.

Identity as a Business Capability, Not Just a Security Problem

One of the most striking conversations I had at EIC was with Eve Maler, founder of Venn Factory and author of Mastering Digital Identity: From Risk to Revenue. Her central argument is that most CEOs barely think about digital identity until something goes catastrophically wrong, and by then it is far too late to treat it as a footnote.

Eve believes identity should be understood as a business enabler rather than a purely technical function. When identity sits solely within a security team, the metrics tend to focus on risk reduction while overlooking customer experience, revenue growth, and broader business value. She described four jobs that identity actually does: protecting people and transactions, personalising customer experience, enabling payments and commercial interactions, and giving people convenience and control over their own digital lives. Most organisations, in her experience, invest heavily in the first and neglect the other three.

Treating identity as a product rather than a project changes the conversation entirely. It creates accountability for delivering value to customers and to the business, not just for closing security gaps.

Nishant Kaushik, CTO of the FIDO Alliance, made a related point from a different angle. Trust, he told me, is built when technology simply works the way people expect it to. It needs to be easy, reliable, fair and available exactly when someone needs it. When it fails, the damage goes well beyond a security incident. It erodes customer confidence and brand reputation. Standards, interoperability and genuine user choice are what allow that reliability to scale beyond a single company or a single market.

Trust Must Work for Everyone

Dr Angelika Steinacker, who works as an enterprise IAM consultant and serves as DACH ambassador for Women in Identity, offered one of the most important reminders of the conference: a digital identity solution that does not work for everyone does not work.

Inclusion means a system remains usable regardless of age, skin colour, disability or cognitive impairment. Women in Identity has spent roughly five years researching this, moving from identifying where exclusion happens, to listening to people who have experienced it, to quantifying its economic cost in collaboration with the London School of Economics. That research produced a striking finding. When people cannot access services because an identity system fails them, participation in the digital economy falls, and that ultimately affects productivity and GDP. Inclusion, in other words, is not only a social responsibility. It is a measurable economic one.

Angelika was equally direct about why progress remains slow. Identity systems are often designed and tested by fairly homogeneous teams, who naturally build for people whose backgrounds resemble their own. Retrofitting inclusion after launch is far more expensive and far less effective than building it in from day one. As she puts it, diversity is not an end product. It is an entire development process.

Preparing for a World After Classical Cryptography

Not every threat to identity is about who gets left out. Some of it is about what happens to the data we generate today, years from now. Dr Michael B Jones walked me through the quantum question in stark terms. Within a decade or so, quantum computers are likely to be capable of breaking the classical public key cryptography that underpins most of today's digital identity infrastructure. Nobody can say precisely when, and that uncertainty is exactly why organisations struggle to justify acting now.

The risk is already live in a practical sense, through what is known as store now, decrypt later. Well resourced attackers can capture encrypted traffic today with no ability to read it, and simply wait for the computing power to catch up. For sectors such as finance, healthcare and government, information that is sensitive today will often still be sensitive in fifteen or twenty years.

Mike's message to executives was refreshingly simple. You do not need to understand Shor's algorithm to understand the business risk. Migration takes years, uncertainty is not a reason to delay, and organisations handling long lived sensitive data should be planning now rather than waiting for a definitive deadline. He was equally clear that quantum computing is not only a threat. The same power that endangers today's encryption could unlock breakthroughs in drug discovery, materials science, and personalised medicine. It is worth remembering, as he pointed out, that standards like OpenID Connect, now used every time someone signs in with Google or Apple, were born from informal conversations in a hotel lobby at an early EIC event. Progress in this field has always depended on practitioners choosing to collaborate rather than work in isolation.

What Happens to Our Identity After We Die

A theme that surprised me by how little attention it usually receives was raised by Dean H Saxe, co-author of the OpenID Foundation whitepaper The Unfinished Digital Estate: Culture, Law and Technology After Death. Managing a person's digital estate, from email accounts to cloud storage to banking logins, remains extremely difficult for individuals, families, businesses and governments alike.

Dean pointed out that death creates a significant window for fraud. In the UK, for example, pension payments can continue to be collected by family members if the authorities are not informed of a death promptly. The challenge is designing mechanisms that release access only after a genuine trigger event, whether that is death, incapacity or a legal guardianship order, without creating a gap that a fraudster can exploit in the meantime. An executor might need access to specific accounts, but that does not mean they should be able to log into a password manager and move money out of an investment account.

These questions are shaped as much by culture, religion and inheritance law as by technology. In some countries families manage almost everything after a death. In others, only a formally appointed executor has any authority at all. That is precisely why Dean argues for open, extensible standards, so that different legal and cultural models can coexist rather than being forced into a single global template.

The New Layer: Identity for AI Agents

Every single conversation I had eventually arrived at the same unresolved question. What happens to identity once AI agents start acting on our behalf?

Eve Maler described AI agents as a fundamentally different identity challenge from the non human identities organisations have managed for years, such as service accounts or IoT devices. Agents introduce delegation, autonomy and accountability across chains of people, agents and sub agents that existing identity approaches were never designed to handle. Her phrase for the underlying problem was memorable: AI is the balloon payment on technical debt. Organisations have spent years compensating for weak identity foundations with manual human processes. AI will expose those weaknesses at scale, all at once.

Angelika Steinacker is approaching the same problem from a governance angle, working on a paper that asks what purpose and intent actually mean for an autonomous agent, how an organisation defines an agent's identity, and how it verifies at runtime that an agent has not drifted from the mandate it was given. She compares the shift to the relationship between quantum mechanics and classical physics. It is not simply a harder version of the same problem. It is a different space that may need entirely new foundations, arriving faster than the industry has had time to properly define the problem it is solving.

Dean Saxe extended the question into the digital estate itself. If an agent has standing authority to make payments or manage investments on someone's behalf, what happens when that person dies? An agent's mandate might depend on a condition as simple as the account holder being alive, yet reliably detecting that a condition has stopped being true, and revoking authority accordingly, is still an open problem.

Even the future of Europe's own digital identity wallet is entangled with this question. John Erik Setsaas told me the EUDI Wallet is expected to go live by the end of 2026, although some member states will miss that deadline, and getting ordinary citizens to actually use it may prove to be the harder task. Consumers already carry Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, and many are more comfortable sharing data with large technology companies than with their own governments, which makes the value of a new wallet a communication challenge as much as a technical one. John also raised a question I had not previously considered: will AI agents eventually need their own wallets, distinct from the humans who authorise them? Nobody at EIC had a settled answer.

Building Foundations That Last

If there was a single thread running through every interview, it was this. Whatever we build for identity now, whether for humans or for the agents acting on their behalf, needs to be built on a foundation solid enough to support everything that comes after it, in the same way Kurzweil's simple equations only work because the physics beneath them was understood first.

That means inclusion designed in from the start rather than patched on afterwards. It means treating identity as a business capability with real accountability, not a security checkbox. It means preparing for cryptographic threats years before they arrive, and thinking through what happens to a person's digital life, and their agents' authority, long after they are gone. Above all, it means recognising that AI agents are not simply another category of user to slot into existing systems. They may require us to rethink identity from first principles, in much the same way that understanding the brain required scientists to move beyond the chemistry of a single synapse.

The technology to do most of this already exists. What EIC 2026 made clear is that the harder work now lies in agreeing on the standards, the governance and the incentives needed to put it all together, before the pace of AI adoption outruns our ability to do so responsibly.

About the author

Mirela Ciobanu is Lead Editor Banking and Fintech at The Paypers, focusing on following the latest trends and developments in fraud, cybersecurity, and technology (generative AI, blockchain analytics, data, etc.). Topics related to compliance, risk management, and balancing those with a great user experience play an important role in her expertise.

Mirela is particularly passionate about the importance of having interoperable digital identity solutions that help not only to secure payments but also transactions in other areas of life (travel, health, education). She is a strong advocate for online data privacy and protection. As a skilled writer, she strives to deliver accurate and informative insights to her readers, always in pursuit of the most compelling version of the truth. To share more ideas and get inspired, connect with Mirela on LinkedIn or reach out via email at mirelac@thepaypers.com. 

The conversation explores how cyber resilience has become essential for organizations that provide services society depends on every day. Topics include the convergence of IT and OT security, the evolving risks posed by ransomware and nation-state actors, the role of identity and Zero Trust, and the opportunities and challenges created by AI.

René also shares E.ON’s approach to resilience, business continuity, crisis preparedness, and leadership, highlighting why cybersecurity is no longer just a technology challenge, but a business and societal responsibility.

Key Topics:

✅ Why "we can build it cheaper" is almost always a biased and incomplete argument
✅ How the originating perspective (business unit, IT, security) shapes — and distorts — the decision
✅ The most common and costly mistakes organizations make when going the build route
✅ When buying is clearly the better path: expertise gaps, speed, scalability, and vendor roadmaps
✅ Why security and risk must be part of the decision from day one — not an afterthought
✅ A structured, holistic framework for making the right make-or-buy call

"This cheap solution can quickly turn into a security risk, an open attack, a breach — and much more cost than thinking about risk by design." Sound familiar? This episode is for you.

Key Topics:

✅ Why rule-based SOAR has hit a wall — and how AI agents address what it can't
✅ The autonomy dial: why full automation isn't the goal and how to build trust incrementally
✅ Integrations, RAG, and MCP: the new data infrastructure powering AI agents in the SOC
✅ DIY SOC vs. managed providers: how agentic AI is reshuffling the build-vs-buy decision
✅ Where to start: alert triage, phishing, and typosquatting as low-risk entry points
✅ Guardrails, transparency, and the non-deterministic challenge of AI-driven security

"AI agents hate people because they're slow" — but full autonomy isn't the answer either. Find out how leading SOC teams are finding the right balance between speed and control.

This videocast is sponsored by Torq — featured in KuppingerCole's Emerging AI SOC Leadership Compass. Read the report, then watch this session to hear the findings brought to life.

Nitish Deshpande, Senior Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts, will present key findings from the 2026 Leadership Compass on IGA, offering an independent perspective on the current market landscape. He will explore how IGA solutions are evolving to address modern challenges, discuss evaluation criteria and leadership positioning, and provide guidance on how organizations can align their identity governance strategies with business and security priorities.

Nick Nikols, VP, IAM Products, OpenText Cybersecurity, brings a hands-on, practitioner perspective to Zero Trust, focusing on how modern identity and access management solutions can be implemented in real-world environments. Drawing on decades of experience across leading cybersecurity vendors and analyst firms, he will demonstrate how organizations can translate Zero Trust principles into actionable controls—improving access governance, securing cloud environments, and enabling consistent policy enforcement across platforms.

The real test is no longer whether an organization can prevent every attack. That is unrealistic. The real test is whether it can keep operating, restore trusted services, protect critical data, and preserve confidence when an attack succeeds.

That is why cyber resilience is the outcome every modern business should seek. Digital business now depends on data, identity, applications, infrastructure, software supply chains, and third-party services. When these are disrupted, the impact is not limited to IT. It becomes operational, financial, regulatory, and reputational.

In the UK, the cyber incidents at retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) and motor manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in 2025 underline this point. In both cases, business operations were severely disrupted.  M&S had to pause online orders, while JLR had to manage a halt to manufacturing operations and the impact across a broader supply chain. These events show why resilience is a business requirement.

Against that background, progress by Cohesity since its merger with Veritas should be judged on whether the combined company moved closer to being able to help organizations restore trust in business operations, not just restore data.

The answer appears to be yes, with the important qualification that execution at customer scale remains the real proof.

From backup to operational cyber resilience

A key message from Cohesity is the move away from backup as an infrastructure category toward cyber resilience as an operational capability.

Backup has traditionally been seen as a recovery mechanism. It answers the question whether data can be restored. Cyber resilience asks a broader question. Can the business restart safely, securely, and quickly enough to limit damage?

Cohesity is talking about its platform in terms of this broader idea. Its five-step cyber resilience framework covers data protection and identity resilience, cyber vaulting, threat protection, cyber recovery orchestration, and data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) security posture management. This approach brings protection, recovery, security, and risk posture into one operating model.

This is also where the Veritas merger becomes more meaningful because of the opportunity to combine Cohesity’s modern data platform and AI-led approach with Veritas’s enterprise-grade data protection heritage, workload coverage, and customer base. Eighteen months on, Cohesity Data Cloud is becoming the common platform for that combination.

The platform vision is built around four layers. The data platform provides the foundation. Data protection ensures data can be protected and recovered. Data security helps reduce risk and recover from attacks. Data insights aim to unlock value from unstructured data, including for Generative AI (GenAI) use cases.

In practical terms, that means bringing together Cohesity NetBackup and Cohesity DataProtect for broad workload protection, Helios for centralized management and operational visibility, FortKnox for isolated cyber vaulting, RecoveryAgent for cyber recovery orchestration, threat protection for detection and investigation, identity resilience for protecting one of the most critical recovery dependencies, Gaia for AI-enabled insight into enterprise data, and Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for understanding and reducing data risk.

This approach is correct. Cyber resilience depends on knowing what data exists, where it sits, how critical it is, how it is protected, whether it is clean, and how it can be recovered in the right sequence.

Platform integration matters

Cohesity says the Veritas integration was completed in less than nine months and points to six major releases in the past year, including DSPM, identity capabilities, Gaia, RecoveryAgent, Helios for NetBackup, and Gaia on premises.

It is worth noting that Cohesity is not presenting the combined portfolio as two product families under one corporate owner but as a route toward one control plane, broad workload coverage, flexible deployment, and common cyber resilience outcomes.

The distinction between the control plane and the data plane is also important. Cohesity’s claim that these can be independent and can be delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) or on premises is relevant for regulated and complex organizations. Many large enterprises need centralized management, but they cannot always allow data to move freely into public cloud services. The ability to separate management from where data is processed and stored is therefore a practical resilience and sovereignty feature.

The simplification of consumption also matters. Cohesity is moving toward service tiers and specialized bundles. Complexity is the enemy of operational readiness. A solution that is too difficult to understand, deploy, license, or rehearse will not deliver resilience in a crisis.

Restoring trust, not just data

One of the strongest messages from Cohesity is that recovery is about restoring data, while cyber resilience is about restoring trust.

After a destructive cyberattack, organizations need more than a backup copy. They need confidence that the copy is clean. They need to know which systems to recover first, and which identities can be trusted. Not only that, but they need clean rooms, staging rooms, runbooks, communication paths, and tested recovery workflows.

Cohesity’s cyber resilience services appear to recognize this. Its approach is built around education, preparation, and support. Workshops help customers understand destructive attacks. Assessments benchmark current resilience. Digital Jump Bag and Clean Room workshops help define practical response and recovery workflows.

Using the Minimum Viable Company (MVC) approach, Cohesity aims to help organizations to identify the smallest trusted set of services needed to keep the organization legally, operationally, and commercially alive. This is at the heart of cyber resilience.

PwC partnership adds business resilience context

The strategic collaboration between PwC UK and Cohesity is significant. Announced at the Cohesity Catalyst on Tour event in London by Karen Penman, Digital & Cyber Resilience Partner at PwC UK, the partnership combines PwC’s cyber, risk, and resilience capabilities with Cohesity’s data security and recovery capabilities.

This is important because cyber resilience cannot be delivered by technology alone. Boards and executives need to answer business questions. Which services are most critical? How confident are we in recovery? What data and systems are essential?

Professional services firms can help translate technical resilience into business resilience. Technology providers can supply the platform, telemetry, protection, recovery, and automation. The strongest approaches will combine both.

The PwC partnership therefore fits the broader market direction. Resilience is becoming an operating model, not a product category. It requires governance, secure recovery technology and processes, crisis management, and regular testing and exercising.

Sovereignty as part of resilience

Cohesity is also addressing sovereignty in a pragmatic way. Its position is that data should remain under customer control wherever it needs to live. That includes on-premises, sovereign cloud, and hybrid deployment options.

The on-premises model is particularly relevant. Cohesity says customers can run the platform in their own datacenter so data never leaves infrastructure they control. In the strongest version of this model, processing and storage remain on premises, encryption keys remain with the customer, Cohesity has no access, and offline maintenance can be available where required.

This is not just a compliance point. It is a resilience point. Organizations in critical sectors may need recoverability under attack, but they may also need jurisdictional control, operational independence, supply chain transparency, and confidence that sensitive data is not exposed through a public cloud dependency.

Cohesity’s sovereignty message is therefore aligned with European regulatory and geopolitical realities. The key is that sovereignty must not be reduced to data residency. True sovereignty also includes control, transparency, recoverability, encryption, operational continuity, and exit options.

AI, agents, and the next phase of resilience

Cohesity’s AI strategy is also evolving. The company is not positioning itself as the control tower for all enterprise AI or agentic activity. Instead, it is focusing on protecting agentic infrastructure and the data that agents manage.

AI agents will increasingly act on enterprise data, call services, trigger workflows, and influence operational decisions. They will also create new risks. Resilience therefore requires trusted data, protected workflows, governed access, and the ability to recover the systems and data that agents depend on.

Cohesity’s approach is to partner with AI and agent platforms rather than force customers into a separate AI experience. Cohesity Maestro extends this direction by making Cohesity Data Cloud capabilities accessible through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The idea is to let external AI tools and agents query telemetry, trigger recovery actions, access protected data insights, and orchestrate workflows under existing controls.

This headless approach is pragmatic. Enterprises are already standardizing on AI platforms. Security and infrastructure tools need to work where users and agents already operate. However, agentic resilience must be governed carefully. Role-based access control, authentication, auditability, policy enforcement, and human oversight remain essential.

Conclusion

The Cohesity and Veritas merger was always going to be judged on execution. Eighteen months on, there are credible signs of progress.

The combined company has moved beyond the language of portfolio consolidation and is now presenting a clearer platform strategy around Cohesity Data Cloud. The integration of NetBackup, DataProtect, Helios, FortKnox, RecoveryAgent, Gaia, identity resilience, threat protection, and DSPM gives the company a broader foundation for cyber resilience.

The strategic direction is also well aligned with market demand. Organizations need to protect data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. They need to recover from destructive attacks. They have to know what data is sensitive, which services are critical, and what recovery sequence will keep the business alive. They need sovereignty options. They need AI support, but they need it with governance and control. They need preparation and rehearsal, not just recovery after the event.

The incidents at M&S and JLR show why cyber resilience is now a board-level concern. Cyberattacks now stop orders, affect factories, disrupt supply chains, and test public confidence. The question is not whether organizations have backups but whether they can restore trusted business operations fast enough to limit harm.

Cohesity is working to address that question. Its progress is visible in platform integration, service simplification, recovery orchestration, sovereignty support, AI-enabled data insight, partner alignment, and customer examples of resilience at scale.

The remaining challenge is evidence at scale. Cohesity must continue to show customer success in terms business leaders understand. The proof will be whether customers can prepare better, recover faster, restore trust more confidently, and keep critical services running when cyber disruption becomes real. That is the true measure of cyber resilience.

Cohesity is not the only vendor in this market; you can find a detailed evaluation of this and other vendors in our Leadership Compass Cloud Backup for AI-Enabled Cyber Resilience. 

To explore best practices in securing and governing human and non-human identities at scale, join us at AIdentity & Non-Human Identity Impact Day 2026 in Munich, Germany, on October 6.

Nitish Deshpande, Senior Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts, provides an independent perspective on evolving identity security challenges. He discusses why native directory tools are no longer sufficient to protect against modern attack techniques, explores how unrestricted administrative access amplifies risk, and outlines strategic approaches to minimizing lateral movement. He also explains how modern identity architectures and access mediation align with Zero Trust principles.

Robert Kraczek, Global Strategist at One Identity, dives into practical implementations of air‑gapped directory access using an architectural approach that restricts direct interaction with the directory itself. He shows how solutions such as Active Roles enable fine‑grained delegation to tightly control administrative access, apply automation to enforce joiner/mover/leaver workflows consistently, and ensure identity changes are executed immediately and securely. Through real‑world use cases, he demonstrates how organizations can reduce lateral movement risk while maintaining operational efficiency.

Attackers have always studied patches to locate the flaw that a patch repairs. What has changed is the economics of that work. Identifying what changed and turning that into a working exploit used to require rare skill, specialized tooling, and patience. The latest generation of frontier AI models, exemplified by Mythos, eliminates much of that effort, making techniques that once belonged primarily to well-funded, highly skilled groups available to a much broader population of attackers.

This is what destabilizes the long-standing equilibrium between attackers and defenders. The patch is no longer just a remedy. It can quickly become a blueprint for the exploit, and the time window defenders once counted on is shrinking fast.

This does not shift the defender’s problem from prevention to speed alone but makes speed a condition of prevention. Organizations have less time to assess exposure, validate changes, deploy fixes, and recover when something does slip through. And because AI agents and AI-generated applications increasingly reach directly into enterprise data, the database becomes one of the control points that matter most.

Oracle’s response to this challenge, framed around the principles of Secure at Source, Secure at Speed, and Secure through Resilience, places controls, patching, and recovery directly in the data layer rather than relying only on the systems around it.

Security should not be a budget line that attackers exploit

The centerpiece of Oracle’s announcement is economic. Several of its widely deployed security, patching, testing, and lifecycle management tools are now available at no cost for a limited period, or at a steep discount on one-year term licenses, across cloud, multicloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

Anything that gives organizations more security per dollar is useful. In the AI era, it is close to essential. When security carries a separate price tag, many organizations resort to rationing it. They scan less often, cover fewer systems, and defer upgrades that the budget cannot absorb this quarter. We have seen this dynamic before in other parts of the security market, especially with tools priced by data volume, where customers end up dropping important signals simply to stay under quota. Pricing that forces defenders to limit their own protection is an antipattern in any situation. Against attackers operating at the speed and scale of AI, it becomes a liability.

Vendors that make baseline security easier to consume, and that create customer value through infrastructure, services, automation, and guidance rather than through friction around essential controls, are getting the economics of security right. Removing the procurement conversation from the critical path of patching is the right call. A database owner who can deploy protection today, without waiting on a purchase cycle, is well-placed to prevent the next security incident.

Access is necessary, but it is not sufficient

Removing the price barrier solves one problem. It does not solve the one that has defeated security programs for decades: tools are worthless if no one turns them on.

The history of cloud and database security is littered with incidents that had little to do with missing controls and much to do with controls that were unused, poorly understood, or misconfigured. The best security capabilities do nothing if no one enables them, and they help no one if no one knows they exist. Free licenses lower the cost of entry. They do not automatically supply the operational knowledge, deployment patterns, or institutional discipline that turn a capability into a control.

This is where Oracle’s longer track record matters, and where it should now press harder. Capabilities such as Oracle Deep Data Security, Oracle SQL Firewall, and Oracle Database Vault enforce policy inside the database, where applications, users, or AI agents have fewer opportunities to quietly route around it. Controls applied close to the data, and enabled by default where appropriate, are not only good governance. They are a lifeline for the many organizations that lack the in-house expertise to make every security decision correctly. Secure by default protects the majority who will never read the documentation, and that is precisely the point.

Making the tools free is the easier part. The harder and more valuable work is driving adoption: education, deployment guidance, reference practices, and the steady drumbeat of reminders that move a customer from owning a license to running a process. Oracle should treat that as the real deliverable.

A welcome offer, with a question about its shelf life

The offer is structured as a promotion. The no-cost tier runs for a defined window, the discounted licenses for a slightly longer one, and both assume the customer already carries current support. On a careful reading, several of the tools are available at no cost for patching and upgrading specifically, not as a permanent change to how they are licensed.

As a way to remove friction at a moment of acute risk, this approach is reasonable. It creates urgency and gets customers moving now, which is exactly what the threat timeline demands.

If protection that organizations come to depend on reverts to a paid feature once the window closes, the budget-rationing this announcement was meant to disrupt will quietly return. Security that lapses back behind a paywall trains customers to treat it as optional again. Oracle should make the security-critical pieces permanently accessible, as a statement that keeping databases patched against AI-speed exploits is not a premium feature. Keep the cost of doing the right thing low, and security stops being the corner that gets cut first.

The autonomous endgame, and why it will take time

There is a cleaner solution embedded in Oracle’s own recommendations, and the company names it explicitly. Moving workloads to Oracle Autonomous AI Database shifts patching, encryption, and much of the security burden from the customer to Oracle itself. Updates apply without the customer negotiating each maintenance window, and security is enabled by default with fewer switches to forget. For the patch-application gap, that is the most complete answer on the table.

In an ideal world, every eligible workload would already be there.

In practice, migration is measured in years, not quarters. It depends on application compatibility, organizational appetite, regulatory constraints, and customer effort at least as much as on anything Oracle does. Most enterprise database estates will run a mix of versions and deployment models for a long time. The free and discounted tools are the bridge for that reality: a way to raise the security floor across the existing fleet while the longer migration plays out.

Recommendations

For existing Oracle customers:

• Inventory your databases before anything else. You cannot patch, or prove you have patched, what you have not cataloged. Use Oracle Database Lifecycle Management Pack and Oracle Exadata Management Pack to discover versions, dependencies, and exposure across your entire infrastructure.
• Claim the tools while the offer is available and use the patching packs together with Oracle Real Application Testing and Oracle GoldenGate to remove the usual excuses for delay.
• Treat patching as a repeatable, governed process rather than a periodic project. Standardize the workflow, automate it across environments, and report compliance to security and executive stakeholders so it survives shifting priorities.
• Do not let the promotional window become your planning horizon. Decide now which capabilities you will keep operating after the offer ends, and budget for them as well.
• For qualifying workloads, evaluate migration to Oracle Autonomous AI Database as the long-term solution that removes much of this burden entirely.

For organizations still evaluating Oracle:

• Read the announcement as a signal about total cost of ownership, not as a discount coupon. A platform that enforces security inside the data layer and bundles lifecycle, testing, and recovery tooling can lower the hidden operational costs that rarely surface in product comparisons.
• Weigh the secure-by-default posture against the alternatives. For teams without deep database security expertise, controls that are harder to misconfigure are worth more than a longer feature list.

The bigger picture

AI is turning economics itself into a security control. When attackers automate their exploits, the speed at which a defender can act is limited by cost, testing, and downtime between knowing and acting.

Oracle’s announcement attacks the cost portion of that friction directly, putting proven, widely deployed tools in customers’ hands now. Its lasting value still depends on whether the company invests as much in driving adoption of these tools, and whether it keeps them permanently in place rather than as a temporary promotion.

But the threat does not wait. Organizations should act now, use what the offer makes available, and get used to patching and upgrading more often in the AI era.

Key Topics:

✅ How IGA has evolved from static, siloed tools to integrated, multi-identity platforms
✅ Non-human identities: IGA vendors are now covering NHI governance — and customers are demanding it
✅ Where IGA still falls short: role mining, anomaly detection, policy simulation, and workflow automation
✅ The deployment model debate: SaaS vs. on-premise vs. hybrid — and the feature parity problem
✅ EU sovereignty as a competitive differentiator for European IGA vendors
✅ What's coming next: real-time governance, access intelligence, and a new IGA report category

44 vendors evaluated, a surge of newcomers, and a market quietly reinventing itself — the KuppingerCole IGA Leadership Compass is out now and covers everything discussed in this episode.

At KuppingerCole Analysts, our motto for more than two decades has been simple: stop looking at labels, look for substance and for the ability to address real challenges. Security Posture Management is a useful test of that principle, because the SPM family has become one of the clearest examples of a label outliving its meaning. A buzzword loses its definition the moment enough vendors decide they sell it, and SPM passed that point some time ago.

One capability, four names

Strip away the prefix and every SPM product follows roughly the same pattern. It connects to an environment, assesses configuration and state against a set of policies, and produces a list of things that are wrong. Continuous assessment of posture against policy is a genuine and valuable capability. It is however not a new market every time someone points it at a different asset class.

That is the part the suffix conveniently hides. CSPM, DSPM, SSPM, and AI-SPM are not four fundamentally different ideas. They are one capability aimed at different targets.

The targets matter, of course. Cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, sensitive data, and AI systems all have different architectures, risks, owners, and remediation paths. But that is exactly the point. The value is not in the shared suffix. The value is in how well the product understands the asset class, the risk model, and the operational workflow behind it.

CSPM: not dead, just absorbed

The capabilities behind CSPM remain useful. They also stopped being a standalone product. Misconfiguration detection, compliance mapping, and cloud risk assessment were quickly folded into broader cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP), where they belong, sitting next to workload protection, entitlement management, runtime controls, and remediation workflows. No one needs a separate posture tool whose main deliverable is glorified vulnerability scanning with cloud credentials and a talent for generating five thousand tickets.

A finding you cannot act on is not a security outcome. It is homework. That does not make CSPM useless. It makes CSPM a capability inside something larger. This is a perfectly respectable fate for a security category. It is also one that tends to annoy vendors who built a marketing strategy around the assumption that the suffix would remain billable forever.

DSPM: the same journey, with a detour

DSPM followed a similar path, except it took a more scenic route through inflated expectations. Its core scope is real and foundational: discover sensitive data, classify it, identify exposure, and surface the misconfigurations and access risks around it. Treated as the first layer of a data security program, that work is essential. For a while, though, DSPM was sold as the answer to data security, full stop.

A DSPM tool that only assesses posture cannot deliver the outcome customers were promised, because finding exposure is not the same as fixing it. Posture visibility tells you the house is on fire. It does not hold a hose. And the moment a vendor adds real remediation, protection, workflow integration, and enforcement, the tool has moved beyond posture management. It has become part of a data security platform.

Keeping the DSPM label on it at that point does not describe the product. It keeps the trendier acronym alive a little longer. DSPM is necessary but not sufficient. And when it finally becomes sufficient, it is no longer just DSPM.

SSPM: real, but already outgrowing its name

SSPM points the same machinery at SaaS applications. It connects to Microsoft 365, Salesforce, GitHub, and the dozens of other tenants a modern company runs, then checks them for misconfiguration, over-privileged accounts, dormant admin rights, and risky third-party access. This is genuinely useful work. SaaS sprawl is real, almost nobody configures these applications securely by default, and the blast radius of a single over-scoped integration token is larger than most people realize.

But notice what actually creates the value, and it is not the suffix. It is coverage and depth: how many applications the tool understands, and how well it understands each one. A product that inspects five SaaS apps shallowly is not a category. And the capability follows the same gravitational pull as CSPM, being absorbed into identity security, SaaS management, and SSE platforms, where posture findings sit next to the access and configuration controls that can actually fix them.

AI-SPM: a label in search of a market

AI-SPM is the newest entry in the family, and the cleanest illustration of the problem, because the term is still fresh enough that almost everyone can claim it and almost no one has to define it. Naturally, this has not slowed anyone down.

The label is currently being applied to several different architectures: cloud platforms extended to inventory AI services, data security tools extended to cover training and inference data, purpose-built AI asset discovery and governance platforms, and AI runtime protection products with a posture dashboard bolted on. These are different products, aimed at different problems, often sold to different buyers. They share a hashtag, not a category.

Category boundaries matter because they shape budgets, shortlists, evaluation criteria, and expectations. If AI-SPM means “cloud posture management, but now we also detect Bedrock,” that is one thing. If it means governing AI models, datasets, prompts, agents, tools, permissions, runtime behavior, and regulatory obligations, that is something very different. Pretending both are the same market helps no one except the people printing booth banners.

None of this means the underlying problems are imaginary. Shadow AI is real. Agent permissions are real. AI data leakage is real. The EU AI Act, with penalties reaching €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher, is extremely real.

The question is not whether AI introduces new security and governance challenges. It is whether putting “SPM” into product names does anything to address them. Spoiler alert: it does not.

What to do when the next prefix arrives

So how should buyers respond the next time a new letter or two shows up in front of SPM?

First, ignore the suffix and write down the capabilities you really need: discovery, classification, posture assessment, policy evaluation, prioritization, enforcement, remediation, and reporting. Map products to that list, not to the acronym on the data sheet.

Second, ask what the tool fixes, not only what it finds. A posture product that cannot remediate, or at least trigger remediation through something that can, is just another input for real security tools. It is not a control.

Third, check whether the capability already exists in a platform you own. CSPM is the cautionary tale here. Plenty of organizations bought it once as a point tool and again inside CNAPP, which is a very expensive way of discovering that suffixes can be recycled.

Fourth, for AI, define the scope before shopping for the label. The defensible boundary is the governance and security layer specific to AI systems as a distinct class of asset, drawn deliberately to avoid overlap with the cloud, data, network, application, and identity controls you already have.

A useful label gives buyers a shortcut to a real set of capabilities, problems, and outcomes. But once everyone claims the label, it stops being a shortcut and becomes noise. Look for capabilities, workflows, outcomes. The acronym will have changed by next quarter anyway.

John Tolbert, Director of Research and Principal Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts will draw on his recent Leadership Compass reports on CIAM and B2B IAM to explore how AI agent interactions are reshaping both domains, highlight unresolved architectural gaps in current IAM platforms, and examine why existing delegation, audit, and licensing models fail under agent-driven workloads.

Ayesha Dissanayaka, Associate Director and Lead Architect for Agent Identity at WSO 2 will focus on the practical side of this transformation, addressing how to secure agentic workflows, implement identity for autonomous systems, and build scalable, governance-driven architectures that enable trusted machine-to-machine interactions across complex enterprise environments.

Don’t miss the opportunity to join Senior Analyst Warwick Ashford for an informative webinar in which he will provide an overview of the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on MDR 2026. He will explore how the MDR market is changing, the key findings of the report, the capabilities that now define leadership, and the criteria used to evaluate vendors. He will also discuss market drivers, delivery models, outcome-focused service expectations, and the increasing importance of identity protection, automation, integration, and exposure management in modern MDR.

As organizations adopt AI-driven Security Operations (SecOps), Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), they are becoming dependent on security control planes that aggregate telemetry, automate response actions, and increasingly make autonomous security decisions. These platforms are the operational nerve center for cybersecurity.

The question is most acute in Europe, where customers face a complex regulatory environment and where the leading SecOps platforms are supplied by vendors headquartered outside the EU.

This raises a new challenge: SecOps Sovereignty.

From Cloud Sovereignty to SecOps Sovereignty

In previous blogs on cloud sovereignty, I identified four categories of sovereignty risk: data, technology, operational, and infrastructure. For SecOps the same lens applies, but data concerns are best framed as a legal-jurisdiction question and technology dependencies as a supply-chain question, giving four somewhat different categories:

In some respects, the risks are amplified because security platforms hold privileged visibility and control across the entire enterprise.

Unlike regular cloud workloads, SecOps platforms collect and analyze:

• Security events
• Network telemetry
• Identity data
• Vulnerability information
• Incident records
• Threat intelligence

In many cases, they can also take direct actions such as isolating endpoints, blocking users, modifying firewall rules, or shutting down workloads.

The sovereignty risks related to these systems can therefore not only affect data confidentiality but also threaten operational resilience.

Legal Risk

Risk: Unauthorized but legal access to SecOps related data.

Most leading SecOps platforms are operated by US-headquartered vendors, placing European customers' security telemetry within the reach of US legal process. This creates familiar concerns regarding extraterritorial legislation and foreign government access requests. Security telemetry often contains sensitive information about organizational structures, network architectures, privileged users, and critical assets.

For regulated sectors such as healthcare, financial services, defense, and critical infrastructure, exposure of this data may present a greater risk than exposure of ordinary business data.

The issue extends beyond data residency. Even if security data remains physically within Europe, questions remain regarding who can access it, under what legal authority, and whether foreign governments can compel disclosure through legislation that applies to the vendor.

Operational Risk

Risk: Loss of access to SecOps capabilities and data during periods of geopolitical tension.

Modern SecOps platforms now typically operate as centralized SaaS control planes.

Security teams rely on them to investigate incidents, orchestrate responses, and manage automated detection capabilities. If access to these platforms is disrupted by sanctions, export controls, geopolitical disputes, or vendor decisions, security operations may be significantly impaired.

As geopolitical tensions increase, organizations are evaluating whether critical digital services remain available during periods of international conflict or regulatory confrontation.

Organizations must therefore ask:

• Can we continue to detect threats if the service becomes unavailable?
• Can we access historical security telemetry?
• Can we export rules, playbooks, and threat intelligence?
• Can we operate independently during a geopolitical crisis?

These questions are familiar from cloud sovereignty debates, but acquire new urgency when the system being disrupted is the one detecting attacks.

Infrastructure Risk

Risk: Loss of access to SecOps capabilities and data.

Security operations platforms depend on cloud infrastructure, data processing facilities, networking services, and AI infrastructure.

Even where a security vendor offers regional hosting, dependencies may still exist on foreign-owned infrastructure, global management planes, or externally controlled AI services.

The sovereignty question therefore extends beyond where logs are stored to encompass the entire operational stack that processes, correlates, and analyzes security data.

Supply Chain Risk

Risk: Loss of Trust in the SecOps data and capabilities.

SecOps platforms incorporate multiple layers of third-party dependencies:

• Threat intelligence providers
• AI and machine learning services
• Cloud infrastructure providers
• Open-source components
• Managed detection services

This creates complex supply chain dependencies that may not be visible to customers.

A sovereign SecOps strategy therefore requires transparency regarding who operates critical services, who controls updates, where AI models are hosted, and how dependencies are governed.

As with cloud sovereignty, supplier diversity and architectural openness become important mitigations.

The CNAPP Challenge

CNAPP are becoming the control plane for the AI-native business but are mostly US-owned. This creates a particularly interesting sovereignty challenge.

By design, CNAPP solutions aggregate data across cloud environments, identities, workloads, Kubernetes clusters, application pipelines, and security controls. They have become the single source of truth for cloud security posture and risk management.

This concentration of visibility creates significant value but also increases sovereignty concerns.

Organizations evaluating CNAPP solutions should therefore consider:

• Where security telemetry is processed
• Who controls the management plane
• Whether customer-controlled encryption is available
• How data portability is supported
• What happens during a geopolitical disruption
• Whether AI-driven analysis can operate within sovereign boundaries

As CNAPP platforms become increasingly AI-enabled, sovereignty considerations will extend to model training, inference locations, and control over security-related AI systems.

Palo Alto Networks and Deutsche Telekom: A New Direction

In June 2026, Palo Alto Networks and Deutsche Telekom announced Sovereign Cortex with T Security, a service that brings Palo Alto Networks' AI-driven Cortex SecOps platform to European regulated industries with sovereignty controls independently governed by Deutsche Telekom.

The significance of this announcement is not simply that data remains within Europe. Rather, it reflects a broader recognition that security operations platforms have themselves become sovereignty-sensitive infrastructure.

The announced offering combines Palo Alto Networks' security analytics and AI capabilities with Deutsche Telekom acting as a European trust anchor, providing governance and operational controls aligned with European sovereignty requirements. The initial target for this includes organizations in healthcare, financial services, the public sector, and critical national infrastructure.

Whether such approaches fully mitigate sovereignty concerns remains open to debate. Sovereign Cortex is itself hosted on Deutsche Telekom's Sovereign Google Cloud Platform, with Telekom Security holding the encryption keys in its own data centers: this layered architecture illustrates how difficult it is to separate European SecOps fully from US-controlled infrastructure. However, the announcement signals that the market is beginning to recognize SecOps sovereignty as an important distinct requirement.

Final Thoughts

The next phase of digital sovereignty will not be defined solely by cloud infrastructure.

As organizations increasingly rely on AI-driven security operations, sovereignty concerns must extend to platforms that monitor, analyze, and protect their digital environments. Security operations systems are becoming critical national and organizational infrastructure.

The key question is no longer: "Where is my data?"

Instead, organizations must ask:

"Who controls my security operations, who can access them, and will they continue to function when geopolitical conditions deteriorate?"

SecOps sovereignty is about ensuring that organizations retain control of their security posture, incident response capabilities, and cyber resilience regardless of legal, political, or geopolitical disruption.

As sovereignty debates move beyond cloud infrastructure and into cybersecurity operations, SecOps and CNAPP platforms will the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework be enough.

Join a KuppingerCole Impact Day to get practical insights on identity, security, and digital transformation.

In this case, however, the AI story was connected to a real enterprise problem: complexity. Enterprises are not standardizing on one cloud, one application architecture, or one AI model. They operate across data centers, public clouds, edge locations, SaaS services, APIs, Kubernetes clusters, and AI inference environments. F5’s message at AppWorld was that this complexity is not a temporary phase on the way to something cleaner but, in fact, the new operating model.

The company is repositioning application delivery as a strategic control point for the AI-era enterprise. In the roadmap session, F5 described the infrastructure shift as moving “from packets to tokens,” which may be the most precise framing. Traditional application delivery was about traffic, protocols, and availability. The next-generation application delivery stack must also understand APIs, models, agents, data flows, runtime policy, token costs, and AI-specific risks.

Application Delivery Is Relevant Again

The central story is F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform, or ADSP. This is the umbrella under which F5 is bringing together BIG-IP, NGINX, and Distributed Cloud Services capabilities like WAF, API security, bot defense, observability, and AI security. The ambition is obvious: make it the platform that delivers, secures, observes, and increasingly governs applications wherever they run.

Of course, every technology vendor wants to be a platform because “platform” has become the default claim of any company assembling more than two products. F5's claim is harder to dismiss than most. Large organizations already rely on F5 in the data path for critical application delivery, resilience, and security. The company is trying to extend an existing infrastructure position into a world where application traffic increasingly includes APIs, AI models, and autonomous agents.

This also fits a broader point I made recently in Why API Security Is Becoming the Core of Enterprise Cyber Defense: APIs are no longer just developer plumbing. They are the channels through which business logic, data access, automation, and increasingly AI agents operate. Application delivery and API security are therefore no longer adjacent topics. They are becoming part of the same control problem.

Hybrid Multicloud Is the New Baseline

F5’s event narrative was built around the idea that hybrid multicloud is no longer a transitional mess. It is the baseline. According to F5's own research, 93% of organizations now operate in hybrid multicloud environments, with F5 customers running applications across an average of more than 19 environments.

That complexity is precisely the problem F5 Insight for ADSP is designed to address. The company acknowledged that customers value the technology, but that understanding what it does, managing it across environments, and transferring knowledge between teams can be difficult. Insight is intended to change that by turning telemetry into natural-language explanations, root-cause analysis, application health views, and prioritized remediation guidance.

APIs, AI, and Runtime Control

F5 is extending API discovery and protection deeper into enterprise environments, including BIG-IP deployments and air-gapped local editions. API security is often discussed as if the main issue were public-facing APIs exposed through modern cloud gateways. In reality, many important APIs are internal, hybrid, undocumented, or connected to legacy systems.

Every time an AI application calls a model, every time an agent calls a tool, and every time a workflow stitches together services, APIs are doing the work. This is why F5’s AI security story is strongest when framed around runtime control and remediation, not just detection. The combination of F5 AI Red Team, F5 AI Guardrails, and AI Remediate is meant to identify weaknesses, translate them into runtime protections, and let the customer decide when these protections go live.

That human-in-the-loop element is important. Agentic AI is not just an authentication problem or a prompt security problem. MCP servers, tool definitions, agents, and downstream integrations create a dependency graph that must be inventoried, reviewed, and monitored at runtime. A valid token does not mean safe behavior. It only means someone or something was allowed to connect.

AI agents are changing the nature of data access because they chain operations, combine data sources, and adapt behavior based on intermediate results. F5 does not own the data layer, but its position in the traffic path gives it a relevant enforcement and observation point for these new flows.

Sovereignty and Resilience

Digital sovereignty was another important theme, especially in the European context. F5 framed it as autonomy over data, technology stack, and operations, including where data lives, how quickly organizations recover from disruption, which infrastructure providers they depend on, and how much they rely on any single provider. That is the right direction, because digital sovereignty is often reduced to data residency, which is far too narrow.

For F5, sovereignty can be a tailwind. In the analyst Q&A session, the company’s leadership argued that many customers are moving away from overreliance on U.S. hyperscalers toward on-premises deployments, local cloud alternatives, and customer-controlled infrastructure. At the same time, F5 remains a US vendor, so the sovereignty message must be handled carefully. The stronger argument is not “buy from us instead of hyperscalers” but one centered on deployment choice, operational autonomy, and customer control over where critical functions run.

This also echoes the argument I made in Platform Dependence and the Growing Fragility of the Internet: resilience cannot be outsourced entirely. Platform consolidation creates efficiency, but it also creates dependency. Sovereignty without resilience is just a different form of fragility.

Cryptographic agility is a case in point. F5 BIG-IP v21, highlighted at the event, adds support for hybrid ciphers combining classical ECC with ML-KEM - incremental and non-disruptive by design, which is precisely how infrastructure adapts before it is forced to.

The Caveats: Convergence, Developers, and Agents

There are still areas where F5 needs to prove execution. The first is platform convergence. ADSP is a compelling umbrella, but F5 must bring together several product families with different histories, deployment models, and operating assumptions. A genuinely converged platform would deliver common policies, shared telemetry, simpler operations, clearer packaging, and a realistic migration path.

The second is developer relevance. F5 was clear that its enterprise engagement model remains centered on NetOps and SecOps, not developers. And yet, agentic AI, MCP usage, and AI-assisted application development often start in development and test environments before reaching production. F5 does not need to become a developer tools company, but it will need a credible way to influence platform engineering and application design earlier in the lifecycle.

The third is agent identity. The industry has not yet established how to authorize agents continuously and in context, and F5 has no answer here either, at least not yet.

Bottom Line

F5 is addressing real enterprise conditions: hybrid multicloud complexity, expanding API surfaces, AI-driven traffic, digital sovereignty demands, and a persistent shortage of specialist expertise.

The opportunity is significant because F5 already sits where many of these problems converge: in the data path, close to applications, APIs, users, bots, models, and agents. The risk is that convergence becomes too complicated before it becomes useful. F5’s job now is not to prove that it has enough products but to demonstrate that ADSP can become a coherent operating model for customers.

If F5 can make delivery, security, observability, and AI governance simpler across hybrid environments, the move from packets to tokens may give application delivery renewed strategic relevance.

Key Topics:

✅ Agentic AI as a new class of insider threat — autonomous, non-deterministic, and without ethics
✅ Data-centric defense vs. agent discovery: protect the vault, not the crowd
✅ Why dynamic authorization and behavior analytics are the IAM industry's urgent next step
✅ Data sovereignty and geopolitics: eroding trust in non-European SaaS vendors
✅ AuthZEN wins the EIC Award — a standard built before anyone knew the problem it would solve
✅ Martin Kuppinger's closing keynote: "Everything we failed to solve in the past decades bites back now"

"An agent behaves like a human insider threat — but without any sense of right or wrong." If your IAM program isn't ready for that, this episode is required listening.

Alejandro Leal, Senior Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts will explore how PAM vendors are addressing NHIs, cloud entitlements, and real-time authorization challenges. They will analyze the convergence of PAM with IGA and CIEM, while highlighting gaps, vendor strategies, and implications for modern security architectures.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how privilege access has shifted over the years
• Learn how NHIs and Agentic AI reshape PAM priorities and risk models
• Explore PAM capabilities beyond vaulting and session control
• Examine convergence between PAM, IGA, and CIEM
• Assess vendor approaches across global PAM markets

Attendees will get a preview of the Leader chart along with analyst commentary on methodology, market structure, and the capabilities that define high performers. Whether you are building a B2B IAM strategy, evaluating solutions, or benchmarking your own platform, this session delivers structured insight grounded in primary research.

John Tolbert, Director of Research and Lead Analyst at KuppingerCole, has enterprise practitioner experience and deep analyst expertise to this topic. Before joining KuppingerCole, John worked as a security specialist at Fortune 500 companies and tech startups, giving him firsthand exposure to the operational realities that B2B IAM solutions must address. He will walk through the Leader chart, explain the evaluation methodology, and share candid observations on what the market is getting right and where gaps remain. Participants will leave with a sharper analytical lens for evaluating solutions in this space.

Key Takeaways

• Understand what B2B Identity and Access Management (B2B IAM) is and why it requires a distinct evaluation framework from workforce IAM and CIAM
• Get a first look at the KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass on B2B Identity and Access Management, including a preview of the Leader chart and insights into the evaluation methodology
• Learn which capabilities separate market leaders from the rest, including identity federation, delegated administration, partner lifecycle management, fine-grained authorization, and Know Your Business (KYB)
• Explore emerging trends shaping the B2B IAM market, such as federated background checks, AI-assisted governance, and evolving regulatory requirements
• Gain practical guidance for evaluating B2B IAM platforms, understanding common solution gaps, and defining selection criteria for your organization

Yet beneath the headlines, a different story has been unfolding.

• Recent data suggests that more technology professionals are moving from the US to Europe than in the opposite direction.
• The EU's technology sector has become an increasingly important contributor to the economy. In 2023, it generated more than €816 billion in value added, representing 5.24% of the EU's total gross value added (GVA).
• Between 2015 and 2025, the number of funded tech companies in the EU increased from 13,000 to 40,000.
• Venture investment in European defense tech reached €2.5 billion in 2025, more than 10-fold since 2020. For comparison, venture investments into US-based defense tech startups totaled approximately $38 billion through the first half of 2025.
• Over the past decade, the number of ICT specialists in the EU increased by 59.4%, more than 6 times the increase (9.8%) in total employment.
• In 2025, after three consecutive years of declining investment, the European venture capital market showed signs of recovery with €66.2 billion invested. Approximately 36% of European VC funding went to tech companies that year, up from just 19% in 2021.

These statistics do not put the EU on equal footing with the US. However, they reflect a gradual shift in investor confidence. Although Europe lags behind the US and China in terms of overall size, its technology ecosystem is growing in ways that warrant closer attention.

The Sovereignty Debate

Over the past year, discussions around digital sovereignty have moved from the margins of policy debates to the center of the EU's technology agenda. A series of geopolitical and economic developments have contributed to this shift, including supply chain disruptions, growing tensions between the US and China, the extraterritorial reach of legislation such as the U.S. CLOUD Act, and broader concerns about Europe's dependence on foreign cloud providers, artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, semiconductors, and critical digital services.

Together, these developments have prompted policymakers to examine whether the EU can maintain sufficient control over the technologies upon which its economy, public services, and critical infrastructure increasingly depend.

As this KuppingerCole Analysts’ Advisory Note argues, the real question is not whether digital sovereignty supports the EU's technological and economic interests, but rather how digital sovereignty can be structured to support these interests without undermining security or economic competitiveness.

Against this backdrop, the European Commission introduced the European Technological Sovereignty Package on June 3rd, 2026. The initiative aims to strengthen the EU's capabilities in semiconductors, AI, cloud infrastructure, and open-source technologies.

As Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted, the objective is to ensure that Europe can "make its own choices" when it comes to the technologies on which its economy increasingly depends.

The package includes two legislative proposals. The first, the proposed Chips Act 2.0, seeks to expand semiconductor capacity, support strategic investments, and strengthen links between chipmakers and growing sectors, such as cloud, data centers, and AI. The Cloud and AI Development Act complements this by aiming to significantly increase European data center capacity while supporting sustainable AI innovation and establishing a common framework for assessing cloud and AI sovereignty.

Additionally, the package includes an Open Source Strategy that will support a stronger open-source ecosystem by investing in skills, open-source start-ups, and the long-term maintenance and security of Europe’s open-source digital infrastructure. These efforts may not generate the same attention as billion-dollar funding rounds, but they create the foundations that allow digital businesses to emerge and scale.

Beyond the immediate implications for software development and innovation, these investments also matter for cybersecurity and identity and access management (IAM) professionals. Strong digital ecosystems create demand for secure authentication, digital trust services, identity verification, and privacy-preserving technologies.

They also increase the need for interoperable identity frameworks capable of supporting cross-border digital services, digital wallets, and emerging AI-driven applications. As organizations adopt more cloud-based and distributed architectures, identity increasingly becomes the control plane through which access, trust, and governance are enforced.

From Growth to Strategy

For decades, the US acted as the primary destination for technology professionals from around the world. As noted earlier, however, migration patterns have begun to shift. According to recent analysis, the flow of technology talent toward Europe has increased, supported by growing innovation hubs in cities such as London, Berlin, Paris, Dublin, and Stockholm.

Political developments, immigration policies, and changing perceptions of opportunity have all contributed to this trend. Whether this trend proves temporary or permanent remains uncertain. Nevertheless, access to skilled engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs remains one of the most important ingredients in building successful technology ecosystems.

Europe’s technology growth is often framed as an economic issue. It is increasingly a strategic and geopolitical one. The debate around digital sovereignty is not simply about reducing dependence on foreign technology providers. It is also about ensuring that the EU can develop, retain, and scale its own capabilities in critical digital sectors.

However, the EU continues to face substantial gaps in scale, investment, and market fragmentation when compared to the US and China. Yet the direction of travel is becoming clearer. Policymakers increasingly view technological capability as a strategic asset, one that affects economic competitiveness, security, resilience, and long-term prosperity.

As outlined in the Draghi report, for tech companies to scale and grow, the EU must expand venture capital and continue to promote an independent digital ecosystem that empowers European startups to grow at home, whether that’s in Dublin or Paris, and not flee to Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.

Europe still faces significant challenges. Yet the recent growth in investment, digitization, talent attraction, and strategic initiatives suggests that the conversation can no longer begin and end with comparisons to the US. Increasingly, the story is about what Europe is building.

Key Topics:
✅ Why B2B IAM sits between workforce IAM and CIAM — and why neither alone is sufficient
✅ Delegated administration: handing identity governance to partner and supplier organizations
✅ Federation, lifecycle management, and the risks of trusting external HR processes
✅ "Know Your Business" — vetting organizations, sanctions screening, and org-level trust
✅ Fine-grained authorization: why RBAC falls short and ABAC/RBAC are taking over
✅ Agentic AI in B2B IAM: agents acting on behalf of external organizations

Supply chains with thousands of partner organizations, freelancers with hour-long access windows, and AI agents acting on behalf of external companies B2B IAM has to handle all of it. KuppingerCole Analysts' first B2B IAM Leadership Compass is out now read it alongside this episode to get the full picture of an emerging market you can't afford to ignore.

Key Topics:

✅ What CDNs are and why they're no longer optional for competitive organizations
✅ How CDN and DDoS mitigation differ — and where they overlap
✅ Cache busting, HTTP floods, Slowloris and other real-world attack vectors
✅ Why "security-first CDN" is fundamentally different from "CDN with security bolted on"
✅ What CISOs and infrastructure leaders should look for when evaluating CDN solutions
✅ How to measure CDN value from day one: round trip time and time to render

A CDN without security is just a bigger target — find out why building security in from the ground up changes everything.

This webinar cuts through the market noise to address what generic replacement messaging ignores: the governance risks that emerge *during* transition, the structural limitations of Entra-only strategies for AD lifecycle, and how behavioral analytics can surface over-provisioning before it follows you into your new environment.

Nitish Deshpande, Senior Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts, will examine the identity governance transformation that SAP IDM end of life demands, beyond just the platform replacement. He will assess the market landscape, outline what organizations most commonly overlook in migration planning, and discuss how behavioral-driven governance strengthens compliance and reduces entitlement risk across hybrid environments.

Robert Kraczek, Global Strategist at One Identity, will present a practical approach to SAP IDM migration using Identity Manager available on-premises or hosted via Identity Manager On Demand, alongside Active Roles for AD and Entra ID lifecycle management. He will explain why Entra alone does not close the AD governance gap, how Identity Manager's consistent governance model spans SAP and non-SAP systems regardless of deployment model, and what organizations should prioritize to reach the 2027 deadline without sacrificing governance continuity.

Key Topics:

✅ How the definition of "privilege" has shifted from admin accounts to dynamic runtime identity capabilities
✅ PAM convergence with IGA, CIEM, ITDR, SIEM, and SOAR — the end of the standalone PAM product
✅ Non-Human Identities (NHIs) and agentic AI: the silent accumulation of machine privilege
✅ Just-in-time access: the gap between concept and operational reality
✅ Deployment sovereignty: who controls the keys to the kingdom — SaaS, on-prem, or hybrid?
✅ AI and ML in PAM: separating genuine innovation from marketing inflation

"Most enterprises can tell you the number of employees they have — very few can tell you the number of machine identities." If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you.

Martin Kuppinger, Founder and Distinguished Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts will explore the evolution from SAP-centric access control to unified governance across heterogeneous environments. He will highlight key findings from Leadership Compass reports, SAP Access Control & Security and Business Application Risk Management, discuss emerging trends, outline essential solution capabilities, and provide practical guidance on selecting technologies for effective risk management.

This webinar is designed for IT security leaders, IAM professionals, and enterprise architects seeking to modernize governance strategies across SAP and non-SAP environments.

What I notice year over year is simple. The conversations are getting more substantive, more cross-functional, and increasingly focused on the hardest aspects of IAM. And when you run into someone you worked with twelve years ago and spend ten minutes catching up on where those IAM programs stand today, that conversation alone tells you more about the state of the industry than most analyst reports.

Here is my take on EIC 2026 from where I sat. The short version: AI is setting the agenda, but the baseline work is setting the pace.

Agentic AI Was Everywhere. And Rightly so.

Agentic AI dominated the agenda this year, and rightly so. The implications for identity, authorization, and governance are profound. Martin Kuppinger's keynote extended the Fabric concept beyond identity, introducing the Cybersecurity Fabric and the AI Fabric as related but distinct architectures that share capabilities while serving different purposes. The same structured thinking that makes the Identity Fabric a useful tool for IAM architects now applies across a broader security and AI governance landscape.

That framing matters. Because what we see in Advisory conversations is exactly that challenge: organizations trying to make sense of overlapping capabilities, overlapping tools, and overlapping responsibilities across identity, security, and AI. The Fabric model gives them a way to think about that without starting from scratch.

There is a deeper tension here though. IAM has always been a slow-moving discipline by nature. But for roughly the last three to five years, the pace of change has fundamentally shifted. AI, non-human identities, agentic systems: these are not incremental developments. They are structural shifts arriving faster than most IAM teams can absorb. The technology is already in production. The governance frameworks, the best practices, the full lifecycle solutions: they are still catching up. That gap is real, and it was present in almost every serious conversation at the EIC. And it hits hardest where it was already difficult: IAM teams that were understaffed before AI arrived are now at serious risk of falling so far behind that catching up becomes structurally impossible.

But here is the Advisory observation: the organizations we talked to are not yet at the point of governing AI agents. Most of them are still working through foundational IAM challenges. CIAM strategy, IGA tool choices, target operating models, organizational alignment. Which raises the question that nobody has fully answered yet: how do we bring together where organizations actually are in their IAM maturity with what governing AI agents will require? That gap is the defining challenge the industry is now walking into.

The Identity Fabric Is Not Yet Common Knowledge

We opened our Tuesday workshop with a simple question: how many of you are familiar with the Identity Fabric concept?

More than half of the room had not encountered it before.

This is not a failure. It is a signal. The EIC community is growing. New people are entering the field, facing identity challenges for the first time, looking for frameworks that help them make sense of complexity. What landed was not a sales pitch but a structured way of thinking: the Identity Fabric, and our Reference Architecture combined with our Maturity Assessment as a practical starting point that gives organizations a clear path from where they are to where they need to be.

The workshop was full. And when Fressnapf's Lisa Zimmermann took the stage to walk through how we applied the Identity Fabric and the Maturity Assessment in a real project, the room got very quiet. That is what a real reference customer does. It turns a methodology into proof.   

When Practice Meets Theory

One of the highlights of the week was Patrick Teichmann together with Oliver Schluga from Erste Digital on stage. What they presented was not a polished success story. It was an unfiltered account of what a large-scale IAM transformation actually looks like in practice, inside one of the biggest banking groups in Central and Eastern Europe.

The message they brought to the stage was one that resonates with almost every organization we work with: IAM has to fit the organization, accounting for its specific context and constraints, without becoming a collection of isolated solutions. That sounds obvious. In practice, it is one of the hardest things to get right. Erste Digital had started where almost every organization starts, with a clean top-down concept, business roles neatly aligned to processes, everything mapped out on paper. But when that concept met the actual environment, with eighty thousand users spread across different authorization systems ranging from SAP and Office 365 to AWS, GCP, and proprietary layers that had grown organically over years, the gap between theory and reality became impossible to ignore. The only viable path forward was the combined approach: understand what actually exists, identify what works, and build from there rather than trying to impose a structure the environment could not support.

What made this land was seeing a real project, with real complexity, presented without a filter. That kind of practitioner transparency is rare and exactly what a room full of people dealing with the same challenges needs to hear.

This connects to one of the sharpest recurring questions from the week: RBAC is dead, yes, but how does an organization actually move toward dynamic authorization in a way that fits its reality? What does that transformation look like in practice, not in a whitepaper? Erste Digital's journey is one of the most concrete answers to that question available right now.

For Advisory, this is exactly the conversation we have with clients every week. The technology is rarely the bottleneck. The organizational alignment, the business involvement, the ownership model: that is where projects succeed or fail. Seeing it confirmed live by a practitioner, in front of a room full of people dealing with the same challenges, is the kind of moment that makes the EIC worth attending.

What Organizations Are Actually Asking For

The Luncheon this year ran as an open dialogue around questions that turned out to be more loaded than they sound: what does the IAM professional look like in the future, given AI? And how do you actually operationalize all of these topics in practice? Both triggered long conversations. Because the straightforward answer to both is: nobody really knows yet, and most organizations are figuring it out as they go.

Nowhere was this more visible than in the governance debates around AI. The spectrum of positions in the room ran from "humans must have the final word on everything and must understand every decision" all the way to "agents need to run fully autonomously, with independent models validating each other's actions." Both positions have logic behind them. The reality will be somewhere in the middle. But the open question, the one that nobody could answer clearly, is whether that middle ground will satisfy auditors and regulators. That question is not rhetorical. It is one of the most consequential open problems in the field right now. On AIdentity specifically, intent security emerged repeatedly as the topic generating the most uncertainty. Not because people lacked opinions, but because the existing frameworks and best practices only partially apply. The field is still crystallizing what good looks like.

CIAM is a major topic. Multiple organizations, across banking, retail, and manufacturing, are in the middle of tool selections, implementation projects, or strategic realignments. The questions being asked are very concrete and operational. Organizations want to know whether a tool will actually cover their authorization requirements, what the target operating model looks like once it is live, and who owns and runs it three years down the line.

IGA governance is the other recurring thread. Some are carrying self-built solutions that have outgrown their original design and need a strategic path forward. Others are mid-implementation and realizing that the governance model was never properly defined to begin with. And in more cases than one might expect, the tooling is actually working fine, but the organizational alignment around it is not.

A third pattern was AI and Identity. Organizations across industries came in asking about AI and identity, and what quickly became clear was how much uncertainty still exists. Not about whether AI matters for IAM, but about how to actually approach it. How do you manage machine identities in practice? How do you think about access for AI systems? How does any of this integrate into an IAM program that is already in flight? The questions were real. The answers, in most cases, are still being worked out.

The Value of Being Present

What stood out this year was where the best conversations actually happened. Rarely at the booth, more often at the side events, over dinner, or in the corridors between sessions. The informal setting changes the dynamic completely.

The EIC creates a concentration of the right people in the right place that simply does not exist anywhere else in Europe for this domain. CISOs, IAM leads, architects, and decision makers, all in one building for four days, all focused on the same set of challenges.

For Advisory, that density translates directly into meaningful engagement across financial services, retail, manufacturing, energy, and the public sector, with organizations working through the same core questions from very different starting points.

The Bottom Line

EIC 2026 confirmed what we see in project work every week. The identity market is maturing, but unevenly. Agentic AI is the headline topic, and the underlying research and thinking from KuppingerCole is strong. But for most organizations, the path to governing AI agents runs straight through the IAM fundamentals they have not yet fully solved.

That is exactly what Advisory is for. Helping organizations understand where they actually stand, where they need to go, and what a realistic path between the two looks like.

See you at EIC 2027.

As a scuba diver, I quickly learned that admiring the reef can never be my top priority. The unglamorous gear, the regulator and valves and gauges checked before the descent, is what decides whether a dive stays controlled. MCP is becoming that gear for enterprise AI: essential, increasingly invisible, and too often trusted before anyone has inspected it.

The MCP servers now spreading through enterprises are not just connectors. They are an unchecked dependency graph with access to tools, data, credentials, and business workflows. Many organizations adopting them cannot reliably say where a given server came from, who wrote it, what version is running, which permissions it holds, or what it does after the connection succeeds.

Recent MCP incidents have mostly been treated as normal software defects. A flaw appears, an advisory follows, the vendor ships a fix, and everyone applies it. Consider CVE-2026-32173 in which a missing authentication check let an unauthenticated caller access data it should never have seen. A patch fixed it, but it is the reflex behind it that is the real problem. Each patch fixes one defect and leaves untouched the thing that keeps producing them.

The larger pattern is that MCP is turning agentic AI into a supply chain and runtime governance challenge. In our research library, two recent KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Briefs explain why MCP is the API security problem nobody is ready for, and without API security there is no AI security. Both hold because MCP routes requests, mediates access to enterprise systems, and inherits the API governance failures organizations already had. But API security is necessary here, not sufficient. The supply chain dimension is the part the industry keeps importing without inspecting.

The access-control layer is finally maturing. The MCP authorization specification defines authorization for HTTP-based transports, OWASP has published an MCP Top 10, and secure transport is getting real attention. These steps help answer who is allowed to connect and what scope they hold. They do not answer the harder question: what local commands, file paths, secrets, APIs, and downstream tools an MCP server can actually reach, and whether those capabilities are fixed, reviewed, and monitored.

The Recurrence Is the Signal

Consider the STDIO transport issue documented by OX Security in April 2026. It affects environments that automatically load or invoke MCP tools from configuration files, IDE extensions, marketplaces, or agent workflows. This is not a bug. It is a systemic weakness in implementations where untrusted MCP server configurations can lead to arbitrary command execution through official SDK behavior and common client integrations.

The problem is not only that one implementation got it wrong. It is that the same risky pattern keeps moving through the MCP ecosystem, while every downstream developer is left to catch and fix it locally. Many organizations were exposed to Log4Shell in 2021 through code they did not write and systems they had not fully inventoried. MCP can create the same blind spot, with tool behavior and server code inherited before anyone has reviewed them.

Then came the Claude Code source exposure through a packaging error. Within days, fake “unlocked” Claude Code repositories were distributing the Vidar infostealer. The lesson was painfully familiar: developer trust, package distribution, local configuration, and agentic tooling collapse into one attack surface very quickly. KuppingerCole Analysts has tracked this same run of malicious and compromised MCP servers across 2025 and into 2026.

The remediation advice from experts was obvious. It was also pure software supply chain language, and the industry reached for it by instinct even while continuing to file these incidents under API security. That instinct is correct. After all, there is no patch for a server doing exactly what its definition told it to do. 

What Organizations Need to Do Now

The real question is no longer whether an MCP server is authenticated. Authentication still matters. The question that matters more is whether anyone has audited what each MCP server is, where it came from, and what it is allowed to do. Treat tool definitions as software supply chain assets.

1. Start with inventory. You cannot govern a dependency graph you have never enumerated. Scan for MCP and SSE endpoints, identify the servers nobody registered, and bring the shadow AI surface under control.
2. Treat MCP manifests, server packages, skills, and agent configuration as production software, not convenience. Approved registries, pinned versions, validated provenance, and human review are the minimum bar before any tool definition reaches enterprise use. In practice, that means handling them like raw npm dependencies.
3. Stop treating a valid token as evidence of safety. A token tells you who connected but says nothing about the code behind the connection, which is exactly the gap non-human identity governance has to close as agents multiply.
4. Put CLAUDE.md files, skills, prompts, and agent configurations under the same review as an external pull request. In many environments, that is precisely what they are: instructions arriving from outside the security boundary, consumed by software that can act on them.
5. Monitor what servers do after they connect. Provenance and review govern the code you accept. Runtime monitoring governs the behavior you did not predict. Treating agents as trusted digital workers means watching their tool calls and revoking access when behavior drifts, not just vetting them at onboarding.

None of this is new security work. Inventory, provenance, least privilege, change control, and runtime monitoring have existed for decades. What changed is the speed and the scale. MCP infrastructure is being assembled at vibe-coding velocity, often from unchecked open-source tools and components.

Regulation will make this harder to ignore. EU AI Act obligations around logging, transparency, human oversight, and cybersecurity increasingly reach the layers where agents invoke tools and act on enterprise data. An auditor will not be impressed by “we trusted the registry.”

Organizations that keep treating every MCP vulnerability as a one-off patch will keep patching. Those that build provenance, review, and runtime control into MCP adoption will know what they are running. One group handles incidents. The other manages risk.

Many vendors (both established players and AI-native startups) claim to provide “AI security” or “AI governance”. Most of these vendors are directionally right, but the problem space is too broad and dynamic for any one control category or solution provider to address comprehensively.

Securing AI will thus not become one giant market category. It requires a fabric that combines multiple control categories. Much like the need for holistic identity and access management implementations that combine multiple controls led KuppingerCole Analysts to define the identity fabric. Existing security and governance categories must extend and provide coverage for generative AI and AI agents. At the same time, new AI-native controls will emerge for risks that traditional controls are not designed to handle. Enterprises should plan to use both types as part of the emerging AI security fabric.

This matters because AI is moving faster than current controls, both identity and broader cybersecurity can support. AI is being embedded into productivity suites, business applications, development platforms, analytics tools, security systems, and many other types of SaaS applications. Organizations are also building internal copilots and are rolling out specialized AI agents in support of their businesses. Security teams are being asked to secure systems they are currently not even able to comprehensively discover.

Why AI Is Not Just Another Application

Treating AI as just another application is wrong. Traditional controls still apply, but AI dramatically changes what needs to be protected. With conventional applications security teams can focus on users, access control, the code, data, and logs. AI systems behave differently: they combine foundational model behavior with prompts, enterprise context, data retrieval, tools, and delegated action, and their non-deterministic results may change with each run.

This changes the attack surface. Beyond exploiting vulnerabilities or stealing credentials, attackers can now manipulate prompts, poison retrieval, exploit context, induce unsafe output, or trick an agent into taking malicious actions. The resulting risks span application security, identity, data security, and business process control. This shift is why traditional cybersecurity frameworks struggle to fully model AI systems, especially in agentic and generative AI environments.

Existing Security Controls Will Evolve, Not Disappear

Some AI risks can (or will) be handled by current security and governance controls. IAM systems can understand AI users, services, and agents. IGA and PAM systems can govern delegated authority and privileged actions. Data security controls can know which AI systems can access sensitive information and how that information can appear in outputs.

GRC systems can manage AI assets, ownership, policy, risk decisions, and the associated evidence. SOC tools can detect misuse involving AI systems. SaaS security tools can discover AI services, risky grants, and shadow AI adoption inside enterprises.

Existing security categories will not disappear, but vendors must evolve their control models to treat AI systems and AI agents as first-class actors. 

AI-native Controls are Required for Security Architectures

Extending existing security categories for AI will not be enough.

Some AI risks need controls built close to the AI interaction layer. Prompt injection is not SQL injection, jailbreaking is not access abuse, and agent runtime control is not service-account monitoring.

Enterprises also need controls that inspect prompts, evaluate outputs, detect manipulation, protect data retrieval, and enforce policy during AI interactions. They need runtime monitoring for agents that can use tools, act across systems, and with and through other agents. They will need evidence that shows what the AI system was asked to do and what happened.

AI introduces failure modes that traditional security controls were not originally designed to manage.

AI Governance and AI Security Are Related, Not Identical

AI governance and AI security are often discussed together, but they are not the same.

AI governance refers to defining policies, ownership, accountability, and evidence requirements for AI systems. AI security refers to enforcing and monitoring those policies across runtime systems, data access, and AI agents.

AI GRC should answer questions such as:

• What AI systems exist?
• Who owns them?
• What are they used for?
• What policies apply?
• What evidence is required?

AI security answers a different set of questions:

• Can this AI system access that data?
• Can it call that API?
• Is a prompt attempting to override policy?
• Did the system expose sensitive information?
• Did an AI action cause an incident?

The two domains must work together, but governance systems and enforcement controls should remain operationally distinct.

Agentic AI Changes the Risk Model

The emergence of agentic AI significantly raises the stakes.

A chatbot that drafts text creates some risk. An autonomous agent that can call APIs, modify records, trigger workflows, communicate with other systems, or delegate to other agents creates a fundamentally different risk model.

That puts agentic AI at the intersection of identity, data access, workflow control, and runtime security. Agents may act with delegated authority, using workload or human identities, and they will make decisions faster than human-in-the-loop review processes can keep up.

This is why enterprises need an AI Security Fabric: a need for integrated control architectures that connect identity, policy, runtime protection, telemetry, incident response, and audit evidence across AI systems and agents.

Start with Controls, Not Category Labels 

The best buyer strategy is straightforward: map AI use cases to control requirements before evaluating product categories.

Organizations should begin by identifying:

• Which AI systems are in scope
• What data they can access
• Who or what can act through them
• Which business processes they affect

AI Security requires a Fabric

AI security requires both evolution and invention. Existing security and governance categories will become AI-aware. At the same time, new AI-native controls are also emerging where prompts, models, context, data retrieval, and agents create new risks.

Securing AI will not be one market category. It will be a discipline, an architecture, a fabric, or a mesh, and requires a multi-year shift in how enterprises govern and protect this new class of IT system. The challenge is no longer whether AI introduces new risk. It is whether organizations can design controls fast enough to match adoption.

Organizations should begin now by:

1. Mapping AI systems and agents
2. Identifying control coverage gaps
3. Separating governance from enforcement
4. Evaluating where existing controls apply
5. Identifying where AI-native protections are required

Organizations evaluating AI security and governance strategies will increasingly need cross-domain expertise spanning these domains.

To dive deeper into this topic, check out this analyst chat on the AI Security Fabric.

Key Topics:

✅ What Attack Surface Management is and its four subcategories (CAASM, EASM, TPRM, DRP)
✅ How Digital Risk Protection monitors dark web, social media, and hacker forums
✅ What Brand Protection adds on top of DRP — from takedown services to counterfeit detection
✅ DRP vs. Brand Protection: lightweight vs. full-spectrum — and when you need which
✅ Why brand reach matters more than company size when assessing risk
✅ What KuppingerCole research is available now — and what's coming in August

Someone may be selling counterfeit versions of your product right now — or impersonating your brand online. DRP and Brand Protection tools exist to catch exactly that.

Check out KuppingerCole's Brand Protection Buyer's Compass here.

This webinar examines what is driving the surge of investment, which solution patterns are emerging across the market, and how security leaders should evaluate AI-assisted operations. The session will focus on measurable outcomes, analyst augmentation, governance, explainability, and the tradeoffs between traditional workflow automation and newer agentic approaches so attendees can separate real value from market noise and make more confident strategic security investment decisions.

FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Understand what is driving the surge of investment in AI-assisted security operations
• Explore why both traditional rule-based automation, along with AI-driven approaches are needed in modern SOCs 
• Examine how AI is influencing the decision between building an internal SOC and leveraging MDR services
• Learn the current state of AI agents within security operations and where they deliver practical value 
• Understand why the future SOC remains AI-assisted rather than fully autonomous

300 episodes already? Time flies when you're having fun! In this 300th Episode of the KuppingerCole Analyst Chat, Matthias sits down with Distinguished Analyst Martin Kuppinger to unpack one of the most urgent, and underestimated, security challenges facing organizations right now: employees building and deploying their own AI agents, with no governance, no oversight, and no accountability.

Key topics:

✅ What "shadow agents" are and why they're fundamentally different from shadow IT or shadow AI
✅ Why vibe coding means anyone, not just developers, can now deploy autonomous agents inside your systems
✅ How AI agents massively expand the attack surface through prompt injection, data exfiltration, and uncontrolled access
✅ Why discovery and resource-side controls must happen in parallel and why neither alone is enough
✅ What organizations can actually do to gain control without just shutting everything down

The bottom line: there's a thin line between agents that help your business and agents that harm it. Right now, most organizations can't tell the difference.

This panel explores how organizations can detect and respond to identity threats earlier by moving beyond traditional IAM controls toward a true ITDR capability. The discussion will examine how identity signals from authentication systems, endpoints, cloud platforms, and security monitoring tools can be combined to reveal subtle indicators of compromise that often go unnoticed.

Panelists will discuss practical approaches to identifying suspicious identity behavior, integrating identity telemetry into SOC workflows, and building detection capabilities across hybrid environments. The conversation will also explore real-world attack techniques and how organizations can move from identity visibility toward proactive identity defense.

Attendees will gain insight into how ITDR complements IAM, Zero Trust, and security operations and how organizations can start operationalizing identity-based threat detection today.

In this session,  two members of the board of directors, Allan Foster and Ian Glazer, will give an update on the Foundation’s activities and introduce the recipients of DIAF’s awards and grants who will share their perspectives on this vital industry.

As machine identities, automated workflows, and just‑in‑time access models become more common, the old habit of regularly reviewing static access starts to fade. Instead of constantly re‑checking standing privileges, organizations are finding ways to avoid granting them at all.

This discussion looks at how enterprises can take practical steps toward automated, event‑driven access controls and near‑zero standing privileges. We’ll talk about the growing role of bots and non‑human identities, how automation is changing governance, and what a realistic transition looks like - balancing innovation with compliance and everyday needs.

In this session, Reiner Mertens, Lead Advisor at KuppingerCole Analysts, argues that this is not primarily a technology problem. The tools exist - policy engines, token exchange standards, workload identity frameworks. The problem is organizational: IAM programs are not designed for a world where no single team owns the full API graph, where services are built before authorization is designed, and where policy ownership has no clear home.

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of the challenge, a strong advisory perspective on what must change in IAM programs, and an initial reference model for approaching dynamic entitlements in modern service architectures.

This session takes a critical look at the evolution of authorization, from classical models like DAC, MAC, and RBAC to today’s more dynamic approaches such as ABAC, PBAC, ReBAC, and TBAC. You’ll learn how each model aims to address key challenges. It'll also be discussed, which three fundamental dimensions every access control model must handle and evaluate which approaches truly meet those requirements.

By the end of this talk, you’ll understand where modern authorization adds real value, where traditional models still suffice, and how to navigate the hybrid future most organizations will face. The shift in authorization isn’t a revolution - it’s an evolution, and success depends on knowing when to adopt what.

Instead of looking at tools, we are looking at the organization: This talk introduces a holistic IAM Target Operating Model that treats the Identity Fabric as one coherent system of capabilities, responsibilities, and operational services. It adds a third lens that is usually missing: the people & organization lens. Beyond “who owns what,” we make visible which skill profiles are required, how they translate into roles, and how that becomes a pragmatic view on candidates, sourcing options, and headcount planning.

You will learn how to build a multi view TOM of the Identity Fabric:

1. task view across different dimensions,
2. shared responsibility view across internal and external parties, and
3. role and skill view that allows staffing the model with real people. 

The result is an operating model that is actionable for leadership, usable for audit and provider management, and concrete enough to guide hiring and team design - no matter which size the company has.

Building on this foundation, the presentation looks beyond authentication to the next stages of BASF’s Risk based IAM roadmap. It explores how passwordless authentication, identity assurance, and emerging concepts such as decentralized identities and verifiable credentials can further reduce implicit trust, simplify access decisions, and enable new trust relationships across enterprise and ecosystem boundaries.

Attendees will gain insight into how a global industrial enterprise turns Zero Trust from theory into an evolving, scalable identity platform, connecting delivered results with a clear vision for what comes next.

This session provides a high-level overview of the ongoing standardization work at ETSI, where key technical specifications for the EUDI Wallet ecosystem are being developed. It presents the latest developments, key milestones, and timelines, and offers insights into the concrete work within ETSI EUDIW standards project.

Now organizations and users can authenticate to existing IT services using their own digital identity via verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLE)I role credentials.

Using an authenticator software, a vLEI presentation is translated into traditional IAM protocols such as SAML or OAuth, enabling seamless integration into legacy systems through a plug-in solution. As a result, no changes to the existing IT infrastructure are required to identify, authenticate, and authorize users from other organizations based on their own identity credentials.

This approach allows consuming organizations to manage and revoke access rights themselves, while reducing the service provider’s administrative burden - such as creating or updating user accounts, resetting lost passwords, or removing access.

This keynote explores 25 years of recurring IAM pitfalls, from early directory services and compliance‑driven provisioning to today’s Zero Trust ambitions and explosion of non‑human identities. Through a chronological and thematic lens, it reveals why the same failure patterns repeat regardless of technology generation or vendor.

Rather than focusing on tools, the presentation examines the organizational, data, and governance assumptions that have quietly undermined IAM initiatives: treating IAM as an IT project instead of a business capability, underestimating identity data quality, over‑engineering roles, ignoring user experience, fragmenting identity platforms, and prioritizing audit checkboxes over real risk reduction.

Attendees will leave with a clear mental model for evaluating IAM initiatives and a critical insight: IAM success depends less on better technology and more on better assumptions.

Four days, hundreds of sessions, and thousands of conversations about the future of identity, security, cloud, and AI governance — all from the heart of Berlin.

Thank you to every speaker, sponsor, and attendee who made this year's European Identity & Cloud Conference one for the books.

With SAP IdM reaching end-of-life in December 2030, a transformation window of 24–36+ months, and the reality that over 80% of security incidents are identity-related, the urgency is undeniable. Add growing regulatory pressure from NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act, and the message becomes clear: the time to act is now.

In this session, a major Central European retailer shares its ongoing journey to modernize identity governance by migrating from a legacy on-premise IGA platform to a cloud-based solution. The transformation began in 2022 with a strategic decision to move to a modern IGA architecture, followed by the selection of Saviynt in 2023 and the launch of the implementation programme in 2024.

The session will walk through the practical realities of this transition: addressing fragmented identity data across multiple SAP HCM systems, introducing a consolidated identity model based on individuals rather than employment contracts, improving master data quality, and progressively migrating access request processes and target systems. It will also cover the implementation of key governance capabilities such as mover processes, access recertification, and preparation for compliance requirements including NIS2.

Attendees will gain insights into the architectural, organizational, and data challenges involved in modernizing enterprise IGA, along with lessons learned and practical guidance for organizations facing similar legacy-to-cloud identity transformations. The session will conclude with an outlook on future developments, including the role AI may play in the next generation of access governance.

For instance, while MCP offers a promising interoperability standard, its authorization model based on OAuth2.1 leaves gap. NHI lifecycle and governance capabilities are essential, but it remains unclear how to govern hundreds of thousands of agents, especially when MCP/OAuth2.1 proposes Dynamic Client Registration as the agent registration solution. These are just two examples of potential solution gaps. 
In this presentation, we will explore the latest advancements in Agentic AI technologies and delve into the risks and security challenges organizations will encounter when deploying Agentic AI at scale. We will also discuss the required Cyber and Identity capabilities that organizations must have in place before embarking on the Agentic AI journey.

To operationalize this model, three complementary governance pathways are proposed, spanning declaration, detection, and validation:
•    Interaction transparency attributes (ex-ante declaration) – extend eIDAS 2.0 attestations to include purpose and intent metadata
•    Continuous epistemic monitoring (real-time detection) – identify deviations in verified agent interactions that alter user trust formation
•    Epistemic trust certification (ex-post validation) – third-party auditing of AI systems that preserve cognitive integrity over time

For identity providers, this creates a new assurance layer beyond compliance. For policymakers, it extends eIDAS from static credentials to dynamic trust governance. For citizens, it turns verification into an ongoing safeguard of cognitive autonomy.
Embedding epistemic integrity into Europe's digital identity frameworks would not only strengthen resilience against behavioural steering, but also articulate a distinctly European vision of trustworthy AI, one that protects not just identity, but the commons of trust on which democratic knowledge and civic deliberation depend.

Yet too often, organisations feel trapped, pressed by regulations on one side and overwhelmed by evolving threats on the other. It doesn’t have to be this way.

In this session, we’ll cut through the noise and bring you back to what truly matters: building a mature, identity‑driven security posture that naturally meets regulatory expectations. Instead of treating DORA, NIS2, or ISO/IEC 27001 as checklists or fire drills, you’ll learn how to turn them into catalysts for clarity, resilience, and purposeful action.

We’ll show you how to use the IAM and PAM capabilities you already have to strengthen your defences, simplify compliance, and elevate your organisation’s security maturity, without adding tools, complexity, or unnecessary cost.

Attendees will leave with practical insights for building a more accountable, risk-aware governance model that improves audit readiness while reducing operational friction.

Digital onboarding has evolved over the years; each step forward brought new safeguards to ensure you really know your customers. But deepfakes are changing the game; they are becoming better every day, to the point where people can no longer tell that they are fake, and machines struggle with the same.

What are the real consequences of fake identities entering your system, and what can you do about it?

But this shift has created an exploitable entry point for attackers. With minimal cost, skill, or effort, bad actors can now produce high-fidelity deepfake personas beyond human detection and use them to spoof remote meetings. KuppingerCole’s Osman Celik highlights the ease of producing deepfakes: “a few photographs or short video clips are enough to train face-swap or lip-sync models that produce convincing enough outputs to fool many observers.”
This vulnerability was exposed in the attack on the multinational engineering firm Arup, wherein a finance professional transferred $25.5 million after attending a video call populated entirely by deepfaked executives.

Now that video conferencing is pervasive across sectors, deepfake-enabled exploits can lead to the diversion of public or corporate funds, infiltration of systems and information, and even the compromise of national security.

In this session, Peter James discusses:

• Today’s deepfake attacks: The tools, the trends, and why they're working
• Why video conferencing remains the unguarded entry point, regardless of your perimeter defenses
• What governments and businesses can do to close the gap and restore trust in remote interactions           

Who Should Attend: This session will present a real use-case, focus on the use of standards, interoperability and user experience. It will showcase the required balance between commercial, legal and technical in building out cross-border ecosystems with relevant content for policy makers, technologists and business audiences. 

Digital sovereignty is one of the most frequently used - and at the same time most hollowed-out - buzzwords of recent years. Hardly a keynote, strategy paper, or product pitch today goes without the term. In practice, however, digital sovereignty is often reduced to location arguments, certifications, or regulatory checkboxes. “Hosted in Europe,” “GDPR compliant,” or “Trusted Cloud” are sold as proof - while the real technical and organizational dependencies remain unchanged. In Identity & Access Management (IAM) in particular, this oversimplification is not only misleading, but dangerous.

This talk puts forward an uncomfortable thesis: digital sovereignty does not begin with data centers, but with identities. And anyone who does not control their identities is not sovereign - no matter how many certificates, compliance seals, or “Trusted Cloud” labels appear on the slides.

From Sovereignty to Autonomy – A Necessary Shift in Perspective

Digital sovereignty is often understood as a state: data resides in the “right” country, contracts are properly worded, regulatory requirements are met. But this perspective ignores a decisive factor: the ability to act. That is why it is more accurate to speak of digital autonomy - the ability of an organization to control, adapt, and, if necessary, decouple its core digital functions in a self-determined way.

Autonomy does not mean autarky. No enterprise will realistically forgo hyperscalers, SaaS platforms, or external identity providers anytime soon. But autonomy does mean understanding dependencies, entering them consciously, and being able to control them. This is precisely where Identity & Access Management (IAM) becomes a strategic key technology.

IAM as the Power Center of the Digital Organization

In many organizations, IAM is still viewed as necessary infrastructure: user management, single sign-on, a few policies, compliance reports for auditors. This view is not only outdated - it is dangerous. Modern IAM systems effectively define:

• who is allowed to access what,
• under which conditions,
• via which platforms,
• with which identities (human and non-human),
• and based on which external dependencies.

IAM is therefore no longer a downstream IT topic, but the power center of the digital organization. Those who lose control over identities - through external identity providers, proprietary access models, or deeply embedded platform dependencies - lose real steering capability.

Why Digital Sovereignty Without IAM Is an Illusion

Many current “sovereignty initiatives” fail due to a fundamental conceptual error: they focus on data, not on access. But data is worthless if access to it cannot be controlled autonomously. In practice, this means:

• Cloud workloads may be operated “in Europe” while identities are entirely dependent on U.S. platforms.
• Critical business processes are technically usable only as long as an external IAM service is available.
• Switching providers becomes practically impossible because identity models, roles, and policies are locked into proprietary implementations.

Digital sovereignty that ignores such dependencies is pure wishful thinking.

Put provocatively: many contemporary IAM strategies optimize for convenience and cost - and sell the resulting loss of control as “modernization.” Digital sovereignty then becomes a marketing phrase that glosses over missing exit strategies, implicit vendor lock-ins, and non-delegable core functions. For large enterprises with critical infrastructures, global value chains, and long-term liability risks, this is a dangerous trade-off - quite apart from personal (executive) liability under laws and regulations such as NIS2.

Who This Talk Is For - and Who It Is Not

This talk is deliberately not aimed at marketing departments or buzzword evangelists. It is aimed at:

• CIOs, CISOs, and enterprise architects,
• technical leaders,
• managers who bear responsibility for digital core processes.

It will not provide easy answers or “recommend tools.” Instead, it explains why IAM is the neuralgic point of digital autonomy, which misconceptions dominate today, and which strategic guardrails organizations must establish if they take digital sovereignty seriously.

The talk explicitly addresses the management perspective. Digital sovereignty is neither an end in itself nor an ideological project. It is a risk-management issue, a business-continuity issue, and increasingly a competitive factor. Organizations that can autonomously control their IAM capabilities respond faster to market changes, regulatory requirements, and technological disruption. They retain bargaining power vis-à-vis vendors and avoid strategic dead ends. Organizations without this autonomy, by contrast, implicitly shift central steering functions outward - often without ever making that decision explicitly.

In closing, the talk makes one thing clear: digital sovereignty in IAM is not a state that can be “achieved” and then checked off. It is a continuous design process that requires technical excellence, organizational clarity, and strategic courage. Those who reduce it to marketing will lose it. Those who take it seriously must be willing to ask uncomfortable questions - about architecture, governance, and the distribution of power in the digital space.

Precisely for this reason, now is the right time to remove digital sovereignty from the buzzword corner and anchor it where it belongs: at the core of modern IAM architectures.

This session introduces Pre-Execution Governance, a new architectural standard that bridges the gap between Just-in-Time (JIT) Access and real-time execution. We will demonstrate how to fundamentally decouple the user from the application by terminating their session in a remote, isolated browser. The user interacts only with a visual stream - effectively preventing any malware or exploit from physically reaching the target infrastructure.

We will then show how this isolation layer enables deep, real-time oversight:
- Contextual Matching: Using deterministic AI to compare live user actions (clicks, queries) against the specific "Reason for Access" declared in their JIT request - blocking valid credentials from performing invalid tasks (e.g., a "Restart Service" ticket cannot execute a database dump).
- Dynamic Peer Verification: Moving beyond static rules, the system automatically triggers the 4-Eyes Principle (via mobile push) only when the live action contradicts the approved JIT context.
- Exploit Immunity: How separating the user interface from code execution renders application vulnerabilities irrelevant.

The conversation will include the recurring challenges customers have faced along the way, such as IAM modernization, fragmented telemetry across cloud and on-premises estates, legacy applications that resist modern policy enforcement, segmentation strategies that stall at the network layer, and the organizational change required to align security, identity, and infrastructure teams around a shared model. Panelists will also discuss the practical solutions that have proven durable, such as identity-centric policy engines, phishing-resistant authentication, microsegmentation grounded in workload identity, continuous access evaluation, and the growing role of unified policy frameworks that bridge human, machine, and increasingly agentic identities. The session is intended as a retrospective rather than a forward-looking roadmap, offering a clearer picture of what a mature Zero Trust program looks like in practice and what still remains unresolved.

This session walks through how we got there, the architecture behind it, and why this pattern might apply far beyond logistics.

Takeaways:

• Automate access and protection of data using least privilege principle and classification to dynamically protect sensitive data regardless of where it is used or stored.
• Simplify management of data protection policies to prevent unauthorized access of restricted data.
• Simplified policy administration and management through a unified policy platform to respond to new cybersecurity requirements in real-time.

The audience will learn how to assess inefficiencies in their applications and processes, decouple authorization and application logic, and consume authorization as a shared service without compromising their unique security and business needs.

Allan and Guy will share their experience and learnings from multiple B2B projects, highlighting the questions that need to be addressed before begining, the problems that come up, and the processes that need to be in place in order to be successful.

This session examines what it means to establish trust at the operational edge, and why identity must move from implicit, assumption-based models toward explicit and continuously verified trust in environments defined by unpredictability.

This session highlights how organizations can bring clarity to these gaps by establishing a unified, governance‑driven approach to cloud sovereignty. We explore how identity, access governance, and policy‑driven controls form the strategic foundation for securing data, enabling compliant cloud operations, and fostering trusted collaboration across ecosystems.

Participants will gain practical guidance on aligning cloud architecture with regulatory requirements, strengthening identity as a core pillar of digital sovereignty, and enabling innovation with confidence - without compromising on control, compliance, or trust.

Traditional IAM, built for human users and static non-human identities (NHI, cannot handle autonomous non-human identities (A-NHI) that operate with unprecedented independence, scale, and contextual adaptability.

This presentation examines how IAM must evolve into agent-aware frameworks, covering architectural design, technical capabilities, and governance models including ownership, provenance, and lifecycle management. We introduce purpose and intent as distinct governance attributes for agentic AI, and show how containment constraints and permission compatibility together provide a two-layer governance architecture for agent-aware IAM.

Securing AI ecosystems demands cross-organizational collaboration to align IAM with business goals while addressing the expanding threat landscape of agentic AI.

RSA’s Field CTO Ingo Schubert will cut through the noise and provide a grounded perspective on what truly matters for identity security in the coming years. This session will help you distinguish hype from reality, understand where Quantum and AI risks genuinely intersect with IAM, and ultimately make smarter decisions about priorities, architecture - and where to invest your limited security budget

In this session, Hed Kovetz, CEO and Co-Founder of Silverfort, will share what he learned so far from real testing against Mythos, which defenses work and which break, and how Identity Security is evolving to leverage AI against AI without losing control. This includes new and important concepts like Autonomous Runtime Identity Security. Attendees will leave this session with the most updated knowledge about AI threats (with a focus on IAM), effective defense frameworks that they can bring to their companies, and facts that will help them drive urgency and action.

This keynote traces the identity and accountability crisis at the heart of the AI agent revolution through three fault lines:

1. The Binding Problem

An agent acting on your behalf needs a cryptographic identity, not your password. Yet in practice, most agent deployments still use credential delegation, the same model as a shared service account. We will examine the technical challenge of binding an agent's actions to a human mandate, and why current IAM infrastructure was never built for this.

2. The Accountability Gap

Anthropic's legal challenge over AI use in military applications without human oversight is not a US defence story. It is a preview of the accountability questions every enterprise will face. When an agent makes a decision with real consequences, who is liable? The vendor? The deployer? The human who authorised the agent? The agent itself? Current regulatory frameworks diverge sharply, and China's ban on synthetic AI relationships for minors shows how quickly the geopolitical landscape can shift.

3. The Four-Question Framework

You will leave with a practical assessment framework: is your organisation ready, legally, technically, and ethically, to say yes to the bot?

In this keynote, the argument is made that existing IAM/PAM frameworks were not designed for this reality. The consequence is not just complexity, but blind spots, shared secrets, and silent failures.

The session illustrates why authentication is not authorisation and why privileged access management as we knew it is obsolete. We’ll introduce the concept of a dedicated authorisation control plane, one that enforces real-time, contextual decisions at the moment of action, treats all identities, human and non-human, the same, and ensures full auditability and accountability.

Finally, the keynote explains how this approach is not a new buzzword or category label, but the only realistic path forward if companies need to manage identity risk and compliance reliably in a world of automation, microservices, and machine speed.

Attendees will walk away with a clear understanding of the structural challenges in traditional access models and a practical vision for how to rebuild identity control for modern environments.

In this session, we will examine how AI can expedite substantial parts of the connector development lifecycle: processing API specifications, generating provisioning and reconciliation logic, handling authentication flows, and encoding business rules expressed in natural language.

The session takes a balanced view, exploring where AI-assisted connector development is already practical, where it is still maturing, and what validation and oversight practices organizations should maintain around AI-generated integration code.

OpenClaw made that blind spot visible overnight. Over 42,000 unprotected gateways. Plaintext credentials. No audit trail. But the real lesson of OpenClaw isn't that ungoverned agents are dangerous - we knew that. It's that governance at registration time can't help you at execution time. Even an agent that passed every onboarding check can chain tools in an unplanned sequence, act on stale delegated authority, or follow a prompt injection into a privilege escalation - all within policy, all within a single turn.

The missing layer isn't a new proprietary control plane. It's something the identity community already knows how to build: runtime authorization. Per-action policy evaluation at the moment an operation is attempted, and per-query control over what an agent can even discover. OpenID AuthZEN gives us the right primitives - evaluation APIs for real-time access decisions, search APIs for scoped discovery - applied to software actors that improvise. The patterns are familiar: PEP, PDP, obligations, evidence. The actor is new.

In this keynote, I'll demonstrate what runtime agent authorization looks like in practice: an agent stopped mid-action by policy and held until a human decides, a signed execution envelope that separates request from control, and an evidence chain that gives auditors cryptographic proof rather than reconstructed logs.

I'll also cover the tradeoffs honestly - where runtime evaluation adds latency, where it constrains autonomy, and why the answer isn't to authorize everything equally but to know which actions demand hard control and which can remain fluid.

If you're building with agents, securing them, or trying to move from guardrails to standards-based runtime control - this is the twenty minutes that reframes the question identity teams should be solving now.

Again it is time to re-think how we approach our profession going forward.

Ivo will share his observations from his experience working with public and private organisations on this topic, with the aim to give you some things to think about on your way home on what you can do differently to become better equipped with helping your organization success in this era of resilience.

But identity proliferation doesn’t just introduce complexity. When applications directly rely on external identity providers - whether from SaaS platforms, multi‑cloud setups, partner ecosystems, or post‑merger domains - trust begins to spread far beyond its intended boundary. This increases blast radius whenever a credential is compromised or a provider is misconfigured.

In this session, I demonstrate how OAuth Token Exchange offers a standards‑based pattern to decouple identity origin from trust enforcement. By issuing context‑aware, boundary‑scoped tokens, organisations can enforce identity consistently and reduce risk across internal domains - regardless of where the identity was created.

Key Message

The architectural approach applies equally to on‑prem systems, multi‑cloud deployments, and federated organisations.

Call to Action

We cannot control where identities are created — but we can control how, where, and under what conditions trust is applied.

If identity enforcement still lives inside your applications, you are scaling complexity and risk. Let’s talk about how to centralise trust - not vulnerabilities.

This session offers a comprehensive view on integrating autonomous agents into a modern Identity Fabric. We move beyond static authorizations and over-privileged service accounts toward a model of Continuous Adaptive Trust, where every identity, human or machine, earns access through context, intent, and policy.

Participants will explore a blueprint for:

• Identity Attribution: Establishing a framework that ties every agentic action back to a human principal and a specific intent, ensuring full traceability across the identity graph.
• Policy-Based Access: Transitioning from static roles to dynamic, policy-based access for autonomous workloads, aligned with least privilege and Zero Standing Privileges.
• IAM and GRC Convergence: Treating the fusion of identity governance and compliance as the accelerator for a truly governed and audit-ready enterprise identity ecosystem.

At the same time, non-human identities, from certificates, keys, workloads, APIs, devices to autonomous agents, are multiplying fast and quietly expanding the attack surface.

Join this presentation to get a clear set of patterns you can apply to reduce outages and risk while staying ready for audits and the next wave of regulation.

Key Topics:

• A practical definition of terms
• Actors and Usecases in NHI environments
• Agentic AI-Hype and practical effects
• NHI as cyber security threats and agentic AI as fire accelerant
• Useful building blocks and missing parts for modern NHI

We will begin by tackling the foundational challenge of device trust. We will argue that authenticating a user is no longer sufficient; true zero trust requires binding identity to a verifiably secure device before the first access request is ever made. We will explore a strategy for extending phishing-resistant, passwordless authentication directly to the desktop login, and discuss the architectural principles for continuously assessing device trust by integrating rich context and signals from the endpoint security ecosystem.

With this foundation of physical device trust established, we will pivot to the next frontier: the autonomous workforce. We'll outline a strategy for securing AI-powered workflows by moving beyond static secrets and service accounts. The discussion will focus on the principles of discovering and governing non-human and AI identities, and the critical need for an identity fabric that can orchestrate ephemeral, just-in-time access for these autonomous agents.

Attendees will leave with a cohesive, strategic framework for building a security posture that is prepared for the challenges of today and the identity-centric realities of an AI-driven tomorrow.

The core of this growing problem is purpose or "intent"; objects deemed beneficial should be allowed, and harmful ones eliminated. But the calculation of intent is not always so straightforward. Who launched the object? What was its original stated purpose? Who currently controls or owns the object? And how do we validate these claims?

The adoption of agentic AI presents a similar problem for identity. Access controls and real-time governance of automated actors depend on an analogous understanding of intent. Purpose, creation, ownership, operation—these are all factors in the calculation of the purpose of an agent's activity and actions. While calculation of intent is (at times) relatively straightforward, it's more often a rapidly evolving, challenging operation.

We'll learn lessons from what space exploration has gotten right (and horribly wrong) as it seeks to evaluate intent and seek to apply that insight to the current frontiers of identity.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the fundamentals of AI Security and why it matters.
• Learn about the Security AI Framework and AI Security models.
• Identify common threats and risks in AI systems.
• Discover mitigation strategies and security capabilities to safeguard AI.
• Explore the impact of AI Security on IAM and how to adapt your identity strategy.

This session explores how to modernise legacy IAM environments into resilient, future-ready identity ecosystems. We will discuss architectural decisions, governance models, and measurable outcomes that matter to both business and technical stakeholders — from reducing risk and improving compliance to enabling agility and innovation.

Attendees will gain practical insights into building identity resilience that supports security, regulatory requirements, and long-term digital strategy.

But now we're 20 years past those early days and the has changed drastically along with every part of life that's now connected to it. Today, machine identities and AI agents are questioning the fundamental model of OAuth in ways we've never seen. OAuth has proven to be incredibly flexible in the past, and new extensions are being proposed to bring it into this new world. At the same time, alternatives have been proposed that have started to take root in some spaces. Are we on the verge of a new world?

Come to this talk to learn about how OAuth is changing, and how our views of security are forcing re-evaluation of contexts and assumptions that have served the internet well for decades.

Praerit Garg has been building identity and access systems since before most enterprises knew they needed them, starting at Microsoft in the early days of directory services and spending decades since at the intersection of cloud scale and enterprise security. He has a point of view on where this is going, and it isn't flattering to the status quo.

This session maps the maturity journey from fragmented point solutions to autonomous, self-healing access governance, and makes the case that getting there is a strategic decision, not a procurement one.

When personal data can be accessed from multiple countries, systems, or service providers, the ability to control who has access, to what, and under which conditions becomes critical. GDPR requires that access to personal data is limited, auditable, and proportional - and IAM is how we make that real.

Some of the discussion points

• From regulation to construction: what European AI agency actually requires
• Building sovereign AI without sacrificing openness, innovation, or global cooperation
• Beyond consumer-scale models: Why Europe’s comparative advantage in AI is likely to emerge in physical AI and industrial-grade systems rooted in manufacturing, robotics, and embedded intelligence.

In this session, Bare.ID and congstar share how they modernized their CIAM landscape to support more than 7 million customer identities across multiple brands. Instead of treating security and user experience as trade-offs, they established both as key guiding principles to create a reliable, user-centric login experience. A key part of this journey was the shift to passwordless login using Passkeys – turning secure login into an almost invisible experience while significantly strengthening protection behind the scenes.

The session highlights the real-world challenges behind this transformation: balancing consistent identity management with independent brand experiences, reducing operational complexity, and meeting regulatory requirements such as GDPR and NIS2.

Attendees will gain practical insights into how large organizations can simplify authentication, drive passwordless adoption, and build a scalable identity platform that earns customer trust throughout the entire authentication process.

Attendees will learn what it takes to operationalize trust frameworks in real-world environments, how to align standards with national and sector needs, and how organizations can prepare for a future where digital identity must function reliably across borders.

This talk looks at how the World Bank is working to build on the EUDI model to export trust to other regions, helping countries align with the EU model while also facilitating its adaptation to other contexts with different capacities, priorities, and starting points.

In this session, John Peart, representing the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will explore the technology, standards and assurance mechanisms that now underpin trust in the UK market (including a certification system that meets ISO 17065 standards and a new corresponding trust mark) and makes digital verification work at scale. He’ll also share some of the (hard) lessons learned along the way and the UK’s roadmap for the future.

Attendees will leave able to:

1. Read IAM telemetry signals from existing IGA and PAM data that predict insider incidents earlier than detection tooling.
2. Apply a four-node decision tree to test identity-based monitoring against EU proportionality requirements before deployment.
3. Translate one identity maturity gap into a defensible annual loss range, anchored in published industry data.

This session will examine how to protect these identities in a modern environment, make attacks visible, and respond to attacks that are already underway. This demo-packed session will show how simple attacks against service accounts in Active Directory and app registrations in Entra ID can be.

It will also show how attackers can live persistently in your environment, steal data, and act like a normal business application.

• Understand what Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is and how it complements IAM, IGA, and Zero Trust programs.
• Learn the critical telemetry sources and detection logic required to identify identity abuse across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Explore a reference architecture for integrating ITDR into existing SOC workflows and incident response playbooks.
• See real-world attack paths and detections, including MFA fatigue, token replay, and conditional access bypass attempts.
• Gain a practical maturity roadmap for moving from identity visibility to proactive identity defense.

Topics covered:

1. Rollout strategy to build trust within the target group through a user experience-driven adoption approach
2. Challenges in the adoption of passwordless technologies and limitations encountered
3. The steps required to decommission static passwords

In this session, we cut through the noise. Together with our customer Matthias from GLS we‘ll have an open dialogue about what IAM really looks like in day-to-day operations. We'll walk through real scenarios: Are NHIs really new for companies and do require special treatment? What do you do when fancy AI features recommend access based on historically wrong assignments? Or when the gap between vendor promises and actual capabilities slows down your IAM rollout?

Our goal: Don't panic when Joiner, Mover, Leaver processes cause sleepless nights. Most of the time a simple, straightforward solution with reduced complexity is exactly the right approach. Join us to get the bare truth about real life issues and solutions, focusing on real cases and implementations, independent of which tool your company has chosen.

This 20-minute session explains why SaaS security and AI governance must be treated as pillars of a modern cybersecurity strategy. It will examine identity and access governance, weak authentication, over-permissioned users, orphaned accounts, shadow SaaS and AI, misconfigured services, and emerging agentic AI risks. The session will also preview the in-flight KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on SaaS Security and AI Governance.

Key Takeaways

• Understand why SaaS and AI governance risks are growing
• Identify common visibility, access, configuration, and lifecycle gaps that expose SaaS applications.
• Explore how AI agents change governance, accountability, and permission-management
• Get an early view of the forthcoming Leadership Compass on SaaS Security and AI Governance