Bottom line: As machine identities in enterprises already outnumber human accounts, One Identity CEO Praerit Garg calls for consolidated identity governance instead of fragmented, organically grown access management structures.
Attackers are now able to take over accounts faster than security teams can respond, while the number of machine identities in enterprises already exceeds that of employees. Praerit Garg, CEO of One Identity, argues that legacy access management models are outdated and outlines requirements for modern identity governance.
Praerit Garg, CEO of identity security provider One Identity, describes a shift in the threat landscape in a commentary: attackers are now able to take over and exploit compromised accounts faster than classic security teams can react. At the same time, the structure of identities within enterprises has changed — the number of machine identities, such as service accounts, APIs, bots and AI agents, now exceeds the number of human employee accounts.
For CISOs, this means a shift in the control plane: classic access management, which is primarily designed for statically assigned roles and periodic recertification of human user accounts, falls short when it comes to dynamically created and often short-lived machine identities. Garg argues that identity and access management structures that have grown over the years through the acquisition of point solutions create blind spots in practice — for example, in visibility into which identity can access which resource and whether that access is still needed.
As a requirement for modern identity governance, the commentary cites consolidated, end-to-end control across an identity’s entire lifecycle — from provisioning to deprovisioning — as well as unified visibility across human and non-human identities, rather than separate tools for different identity types.
For security leaders, the article offers no new technical specifications or product announcements, but rather a strategic assessment: identity governance should no longer be treated as a downstream compliance function but as a core security control, especially given the growing number of AI agents and automated processes that independently access enterprise resources.
Source: itwelt.at · Published August 20, 2026
Lumi AI News — AI-assisted curation pursuant to Art. 50 EU AI Act. Paraphrasing and classification by Lumi News Pipeline v1.8.3.