CEO: Move beyond 'medieval' perimeter security to identity-centric defense

One Identity CEO Praerit Garg argues that the "medieval" model of building digital walls and guarding gates is obsolete as modern enterprises operate across cloud platforms, SaaS, mobile devices, and automated workflows far beyond any single network boundary, according to Forbes.

Attackers no longer storm the gates; they compromise credentials, steal session tokens, abuse service accounts, and hijack identity providers. Garg cites a late 2025 campaign where attackers exploited stolen OAuth tokens from a Salesloft chatbot integration to access Salesforce environments across hundreds of organizations, bypassing MFA and network segmentation. Non-human identities now outnumber human users by 50 to one, yet they are rarely offboarded, reviewed, or governed.

As 62% of businesses experiment with agentic AI, unmanaged machine identities become a scalable path to compromise. Garg urges organizations to evolve identity into a dynamic control layer, continuously verified across its full lifecycle, treating NHIs with the same rigor as human users, with chain of custody, least privilege, and adaptive infrastructure.