The Identity Crisis Your Security Team Didn't See Coming

InnovationThe Identity Crisis Your Security Team Didn't See ComingByDarren Guccione,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)May 20, 2026, 07:00am EDTDarren Guccione, CEO and cofounder, Keeper Security. getty​For decades, identity security meant one thing: protecting the humans who access your systems. You issued credentials, enforced passwords, deployed multifactor authentication and moved on. That model made sense when the identities you were managing were tied to a real person.​That world no longer exists.​ AI has redefined what an identity is, and most enterprises are nowhere near catching up. AI agents don’t wait for instructions from a human to act. Rather, they operate autonomously and around the clock to execute transactions, access sensitive systems or interact with external applications. Every agent requires credentials and access rights to function. Where a large organization might manage tens of thousands of human identities, the number of non-human identities (NHIs) can scale far beyond and outnumber the human workforce across an enterprise ecosystem.​At RSAC 2026, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said it frankly: When identities operate at machine speed, traditional security models break. AI agents require a new model for establishing trust, not just a retooled version of the old model.​The Scale Problem Is The Easy Part​The harder problem is behavioral. NHIs act nothing like human identities, and organizations that govern them the same way are creating exposure they may not recognize until it's too late.Human accounts have a person behind them, someone who can be questioned, suspended or fired. NHIs, on the other hand, are frequently created on demand by developers or automated processes, with no centralized oversight and no clear owner. if (!window.cnxel) { window.cnx...