Managing Borderless And Machine Identities With Modernized Zero-Trust Principles

InnovationManaging Borderless And Machine Identities With Modernized Zero-Trust PrinciplesByMorey Haber,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 08:00am EDTMorey J. Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust, is an identity and technical evangelist with over 25 years of IT industry experience. getty​In today’s cybersecurity landscape, identity has no border, does not honor geographic regions, resists organizational structure and, most importantly, may not even be human. As cloud services span continents and digital transactions occur in real time, the identity operating in a workflow is the only constant.Today, North American enterprises and their security teams are now managing at least 100 times more machine identities than human identities, with some sectors reaching a ratio of 500:1—signaling that identity security is now shifting toward securing nonhuman identities (NHIs), not only humans. NHIs pose unprecedented risks to operational security. Consider a recent example reported in an Alibaba-affiliated research report, in which an AI agent escaped its boundaries to attempt unauthorized cryptocurrency mining during training operations.As data flows and workloads operate dynamically, employees are logging in from airports, coffee shops, other business entities and home offices. Web APIs call other APIs across sovereign boundaries, and through all these endpoints, identity remains the persistent thread interlinking, authenticating and authorizing everything humans touch. The challenge is that while identity has no border in the modern workplace, regulation and cybersecurity do.Data sovereignty laws differ across regions, and privacy mandates vary by jurisdiction, business vertical and demographics (like GDPR and the EU AI Act). Authentication standards are not uniformly adopted for every piece of...