BY:  Rohan Vaidya, Area Vice President India & SAARC, CyberArk

“As India accelerates its digital transformation powered by AI, automation, and cloud-first strategies, a largely invisible yet critical threat is emerging  the rapid growth of machine identities. From application workloads and RPA bots to microservices, machine identities now vastly outnumber human ones, but remain severely under-protected.

Findings from the CyberArk 2025 Identity Security Landscape Report highlight this urgency. In India, 77% of organisations admit they prioritise speed and efficiency over cybersecurity, while 68% cite AI and cloud adoption as major sources of unmanaged access risk. Even more concerning, 85% report mounting pressure from insurers and regulators to secure privileged access  yet machine identities with sensitive or elevated access remain largely uncontrolled.

This Cybersecurity Awareness Month’s theme  “Secure Our World: Protecting Digital Identities Across All Fronts”  underscores the need for Indian enterprises to move beyond a human-centric approach to security. Nearly a third of machine identities today hold privileged or sensitive access, meaning that even small oversights such as an expired TLS certificate or orphaned credentials  can lead to significant outages or breaches.

To stay ahead of escalating identity-based threats, organisations must embed Privileged Access Management (PAM) within a holistic identity security strategy that delivers full visibility, proactive risk mitigation, and seamless operational continuity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

AI and automation are redefining our digital future  but without robust identity security at the core, we risk building that future on unstable ground.”