Authored by Manikandan Thangaraj, Vice President, ManageEngine
Identity is the key to everything in the digital world, and keeping the different types of identities secure is a constant challenge for organizations today. Close to 77% of CISOs reported experiencing an identity-related cyberattack in 2023. With such events becoming commonplace, enterprises must adapt to the ever-changing threat landscape by orchestrating end-to-end identity life cycles and proactively managing the associated access privileges. With several action points to address, where should the average enterprise shift its focus this year?
After closely examining market trends, industry advancements, and our ongoing conversations with customers, we've zeroed in on five key shifts that we think will define identity security in 2025.
Solidifying the basics with enhanced observability
Organizations are moving toward a future in identity security that demands observability over mere visibility. To achieve this, those with thorough and continuous discovery processes will focus on enhancing this process by incorporating key insights, such as user roles and corresponding access policies for both users and groups. They will prioritize continuous monitoring of all accounts—both human and non-human—ensuring that ownership and risk scores are assigned at the time of creation. This will push organizations to identify threats faster and manage risks efficiently.
Similarly, organizations that employ lacklustre discovery mechanisms characterized by ad hoc schedules and siloed approaches will prioritize addressing these gaps. Discovery usually starts and ends with Active Directory, leading to blind spots. Increasing cyberthreats and compliance mandates will force organizations to prioritize discovery from multiple IAM and non-IAM tools.
This process should include discovery of accounts from applications, devices, local user stores, databases, and SaaS platforms. In the case of cloud-first enterprises, cloud entitlements must also be prioritized. This foundation will help organizations establish more effective processes and integrate intelligence solutions that provide visual, actionable insights powered by identity analytics. This will enable stakeholders to build proactive threat detection and response capabilities. We expect organizations to focus on observability and analytics for human and non-human identities alike.
A move towards centralized governance
For years, organizations with mature IAM implementations have focused on streamlining creation, provisioning, and vaulting aspects of identity security. To make this happen, such organizations rely on multiple vendors (as many as four or more), according to 44% of respondents from a recent identity security survey by ManageEngine. While identity management may be decentralized, enterprises seek centralized governance and control of their IAM systems.
This will be increasingly prioritized in 2025 in the form of centralized governance and provisioning of identities, life cycle orchestration of keys, and certificates. Gartner® also predicts that such centralized governance will gain prominence in 2025, with focus even in areas such as secrets management and policy management.
Varying levels of AI adoption
With rapid AI advancements in recent years, there's a growing need for AI-powered IAM solutions to reduce administrative overhead, enhance operational efficiency, and improve security posture. To satisfy this need, 2025 will see the rise of autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents that act as IAM assistants.
These agents will be equipped to perform administrative tasks such as user provisioning, access requests, and policy enforcement. Leading vendors have been working to meet such needs, and based on initial signs, these agents promise to move beyond traditional automation by delivering a more intelligent, adaptive approach to managing user identities and access rights. However, the level of adoption across global enterprises will significantly vary.
Although over 61% of IT professionals believe in AI's ability to strengthen their identity security strategies, the cost of adoption could be a barrier for small and medium enterprises in the short term. Gartner highlights that "the per-transaction cost of GenAI is higher than that of any average feature today." However, the research also highlights that the benefits provided outweigh the cost in the long run. With several vendors offsetting costs to customers, large enterprises are most likely to be early adopters.
That said, the road to fully autonomous IAM is not without its challenges. Many organizations rely on legacy systems, hybrid-cloud environments, and multi-cloud setups, which could complicate the adoption of new AI technologies. Furthermore, AI models are only as effective as the data they are trained on. Enterprises are now laying the foundation by auditing roles to validate ownership assignment, identifying dormant or stale accounts, defining policies to eliminate excessive permissions, and more, to establish proper IAM hygiene.
Rise of the ecosystem
While the IAM stack as a whole continues to be decentralized, enterprises are now prioritizing bundles over standalone solutions to complement their existing IAM ecosystems. This trend will become increasingly common in 2025. In IDC's 2024 European Security Technologies and Strategies Survey, over 35% of respondents highlighted the availability of a "complete range of IAM solutions" as one of the most important factors in evaluating and choosing a vendor IAM technology, second only to "good scalability."
Interestingly, these findings aren't region-centric—they're universal. The complexities of traditional IAM and PAM implementations are well known, with long deployment times and complex customizations often hindering adoption. Organizations that fail to prioritize solution bundles will struggle with adoption, increased overheads and costs, and face potential security risks. We expect to see more enterprises taking the ecosystem approach by prioritizing vendors with a wider IAM portfolio with tighter, few-click integrations across solutions.
Identity-first security
The rapid growth of cloud adoption, hybrid work, and complex, interconnected systems have made traditional perimeter-centric defenses insufficient, leaving organizations vulnerable to sophisticated attacks targeting user and machine identities. In 2023, only 27% of respondents said their organizations had Zero Standing Privileges–the ideal security best practice that helps ensure no employee, application, or machine, has persistent access to privileged identities. This underscores the need for an identity-first security approach across all enterprise workflows wherever privileged identities are involved.
Unlike traditional approaches, where security controls are often focused on the perimeter, an identity-first approach prioritizes the securing of identities and their associated access privileges as the primary line of defense. This requires organizations to move beyond static, broad access policies and towards more dynamic and context-aware solutions, emphasizing least-privilege access within existing and new workflows. By embedding security directly into the workflows themselves, businesses can minimize the threat landscape of a potential compromise while also improving agility and operational efficiency by better understanding their privileged access requirements.
Several large enterprises have already adopted such practices by implementing policy changes and tighter integrations, and we expect other medium-to-large enterprises to follow suit.
What's the takeaway?
Start by evaluating your current identity security maturity. If you’re just beginning the process, focus on establishing continuous, holistic discovery and centralized governance to lay a solid foundation. For those further along, assess your readiness for integrating AI and ecosystem-based solutions to refine your approach. In either case, every enterprise can take immediate, actionable steps: identify critical gaps, benchmark against industry standards, and map out a clear, prioritized roadmap that addresses your identity security concerns.
Here's to elevating your identity security in 2025!
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