The enterprise has entered a new era – one defined by cloud, automation, and artificial intelligence operating at unprecedented speed and scale. As organizations transform, one truth has become impossible to ignore: identity is now the most critical control plane in cybersecurity.
Every workload, application, service, and AI agent operates through identity. Every access decision, every permission granted, every action taken relies on identity. And increasingly, attackers know this.
That is why the completion of CyberArk’s acquisition by Palo Alto Networks marks a defining moment – not just for our companies, but for the future of cybersecurity. Together, we are elevating identity security to its rightful place: a foundational pillar of enterprise security in the age of AI.
Identity Has Become the Primary Attack Surface
Security breaches today rarely begin with a firewall failure or unpatched vulnerability. They begin with identity.
Human identities, machine identities, and now AI-driven identities have exploded in number. Machine identities already outnumber humans by more than 80 to 1, and AI is accelerating that growth dramatically. Many of these identities operate continuously, autonomously, and with elevated access – often without sufficient governance or visibility.
Attackers exploit this reality. They log in using stolen credentials. They abuse standing privilege. They move laterally through environments that were never designed to manage identity risk at this scale.
Despite this shift, many organizations still rely on fragmented identity controls – separate tools for access management, privileged access, and governance, stitched together with manual processes and periodic reviews. Risk accumulates silently between checkpoints, and security teams are left reacting after damage is done.
This is the problem CyberArk was built to solve.
Why Identity Security Must Be Continuous
Modern identity security cannot be static or episodic. Identity risk changes constantly as environments scale, permissions shift, and systems act autonomously. Securing identities today requires a continuous, adaptive approach.
At CyberArk, we believe effective identity security must deliver three core capabilities:
- Continuous visibility into who or what has access across human, machine, and AI identities
- Dynamic privilege control, where access is granted only when needed and removed automatically when it is no longer required
- Continuous governance, where policy enforcement adapts in real time as environments evolve
This approach treats every identity as potentially privileged, dramatically reducing the attack surface and limiting attackers’ ability to move undetected.
It is also why identity security is no longer a supporting function – it is foundational.
Stronger Together: CyberArk as Part of Palo Alto Networks
Joining Palo Alto Networks accelerates and amplifies this vision.
CyberArk’s Identity Security Platform is already trusted to protect some of the world’s most critical organizations, infrastructure, and workloads. As part of Palo Alto Networks, our identity-first approach will become deeply integrated into a broader, platform-based security strategy that spans network security, cloud security, and security operations.
Identity becomes the connective tissue across the enterprise – informing policy enforcement, enhancing detection and response, and providing richer context to stop attacks earlier.
This is not about changing what CyberArk stands for. It is about extending our reach, accelerating innovation, and delivering better outcomes for customers through tighter integration and shared intelligence across security domains.
Securing AI Without Slowing Innovation
The rise of AI and autonomous systems makes identity security more urgent than ever.
AI agents and automated systems often require persistent access to sensitive data and infrastructure. Without strong identity controls, these systems can become overprivileged, under-governed, and highly attractive targets for attackers.
CyberArk’s identity security approach enables organizations to secure AI-driven environments responsibly – applying least privilege, enforcing access dynamically, and maintaining continuous oversight without disrupting innovation.
Identity security becomes the trust layer that allows enterprises to move fast with AI while staying secure.
What This Means for CyberArk Customers
CyberArk’s Identity Security solutions remain available today as a standalone platform, trusted and proven. At the same time, customers will benefit from an accelerated roadmap and deeper integration as part of Palo Alto Networks.
Most importantly, customers gain confidence that identity security can keep pace with change-rather than reacting after the fact.
Moving Forward
The AI era is redefining how enterprises operate – and how attackers operate alongside them. In this environment, securing every identity is not optional. It is foundational.
By joining Palo Alto Networks, we are reinforcing a shared conviction: identity security is the cornerstone of modern cybersecurity. Together, we are committed to helping organizations secure every identity, reduce risk continuously, and innovate with confidence.
This is the future of identity security – and we are just getting started.
Peretz Regev is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at CyberArk
