The agentic identity crisis

Identity controls in the enterprise have only become more complicated over the last few years.

Initially, the focus was on IoT devices, which were exploding in the enterprise environment. But recent years have brought an onslaught of AI tools and AI agents, all of which come with security and governance complications.

How can business leaders get a grip on the adoption of AI agents, particularly as these tools begin to communicate with one another and with third-party enterprise tools?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Shiven Ramji, president, Auth0 at Okta, to discuss the future of identity, security and governance in the face of AI agents.

Highlights

"An agent can do lots of things on demand, so we all know that there are a lot of benefits and power with this technology. But my biggest concern is that, I think from a security privacy perspective, we need to make sure that these agents are deployed with utmost care and making sure all the principles that we use today from a security standpoint are applied and ensure that these agents don't do things that we don't want them to do."

"Agents can call other agents or other LLMs, agents can access file systems, agents can query databases. agents can view your other internal applications, can query your internal knowledge management systems, so on and so forth. So you really have to make sure that you have control over all of these resources internally and so, I think the second issue here that's getting amplified in a pretty significant way, is a lot of CIOs and CISOs are concerned that if you have these rogue agents running around in your environment, you're not sure that their internal permissions model is set up in a way to handle the use cases that are potentially being executed by agents."

"My bet will be a lot of these protocols will be part of some of these large, open source ecosystems and bodies, so that they have their own governance, and people can contribute and and then I think everybody is motivated to make sure that there are standard ways through which agents are communicating with each other."

Footnotes

• Agentic AI carries huge implications for security teams - here's what leaders should know
• Agentic AI poses major challenge for security professionals, says Palo Alto Networks’ EMEA CISO
• ‘There’s been tremendous agent washing’: Dell Technologies CTO John Roese says the real potential of AI agents is just being realized – and they could end up managing humans
• Microsoft expects 1.3 billion AI agents to be in operation by 2028 – here’s how it plans to get them working together
• IT leaders don’t trust AI agents yet – and they’re missing out on huge financial gains
• Want to deliver a successful agentic AI project? Stop treating it like traditional software
• AWS CEO Matt Garman says AI agents will have 'as much impact on your business as the internet or cloud'
• Workers view agents as ‘important teammates’ – but the prospect of an AI 'boss' is a step too far

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