TL;DR: Identity security is becoming one of the most critical challenges for regulated industries as non-human identities rapidly outnumber human users and create new access risks. Traditional governance approaches built on periodic reviews and disconnected tools can no longer provide the visibility, control, or speed required to meet modern security and compliance demands. CISOs must shift from identity management to identity intelligence, and implement an integrated, real-time approach aligned with frameworks such as NIST CSF 2.0 that unifies governance, detection, response, and recovery across the identity lifecycle. As identity becomes the new security perimeter, organizations that continuously monitor and manage identity risk will be better positioned to strengthen resilience, maintain compliance, and build trust in an increasingly autonomous environment.
In regulated industries, security leaders have always operated under immense pressure to balance risk, compliance, and operational resilience. The nature of that pressure is changing in the AI era.
Identity has emerged as a central control point in modern cybersecurity, and nowhere is this more evident than in government, financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. At the same time, the rapid rise of non-human identities and AI-driven systems is fundamentally transforming the nature of identity security. What was once a manageable governance challenge has evolved into a real-time, dynamic risk surface.
For CISOs, the question is no longer whether identity security matters. It is whether their current approach is built for what comes next.
Identity risk is outpacing traditional controls
Regulated organizations are experiencing two converging forces: an explosion of non-human identities, including service accounts, APIs, bots, and AI agents, and increasing regulatory expectations for control, auditability, and resilience.
It is resulting in a friction that all organizations – and particularly regulated industries – need to manage. With more identities to be aware of and manage, and more oversight being required, organizations are scrambling to keep up.
In many environments, non-human identities already outnumber human users by a wide margin. These identities are dynamic — they create, inherit, and modify access continuously, often without human intervention. This creates a fundamental disconnect in regulatory frameworks’ demand for consistency and control within this new modern identity environment that is fluid and autonomous.
Traditional identity tools, which are built around periodic certification and static policies, cannot keep pace. And the stakes are rising. Regulators and cyber insurers now treat identity exposure as a material control failure, elevating identity security from an operational concern to a board-level risk management priority.
Why legacy identity approaches fall short
Most regulated enterprises still rely on a fragmented mix of tools, such as Identity Governance (IGA), Privileged Access Management (PAM), threat detection and endpoint solutions, and backup and recovery systems, which are each designed to address a specific aspect of identity security.
While these tools provide value individually, they typically operate in silos and only solve part of the challenge, leaving organizations without a complete, unified view of identity risk. This leads to three systemic gaps:
- Lack of continuous visibility, as periodic reviews miss how access evolves in real time.
- Incomplete risk context, where organizations struggle to see identity relationships, privilege chains, and attack paths.
- Disconnected response and recovery because detection, governance, and recovery are siloed, which slows response and increases exposure.
In regulated industries, these are not just technical gaps — they are compliance and operational risks. For example, federal agencies, Department of Defense organizations, and Defense Industrial Base (DIB) contractors handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) or ITAR-regulated workloads find that these challenges are compounded by stringent security and compliance requirements.
Security management platforms that have achieved FedRAMP High Authorization are better positioned to support government organizations because they have demonstrated the ability to meet some of the federal government’s most rigorous standards for security, continuous monitoring, risk management, and operational resilience. Beyond providing technology, FedRAMP High-authorized vendors offer agencies greater confidence that identity security controls, data protection measures, and governance processes align with federal expectations for protecting sensitive information and mission-critical systems. As agencies modernize identity programs to address non-human identities, AI-driven systems, and evolving cyber threats, organizations that partner with companies that already operate within this trusted compliance framework can reduce adoption risk and accelerate progress toward security and regulatory objectives.
NIST CSF 2.0: A framework for identity-centric security
This is where standards bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are actively working to define blueprints for AI agent identity, authentication, and authorization. Gartner validated this approach to identity security, urging security and risk management leaders to ensure their organizations are prepared to adopt the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0, which provides critical guidance to CISOs around six core functions:
- Govern: Provides the strategic foundation for cybersecurity by defining risk management priorities, governance policies, accountability, and regulatory requirements across the organization.
- Identify: Establishes a clear understanding of the organization’s assets, identities, systems, data, and organizational environment so cybersecurity risks can be accurately assessed and managed.
- Protect: Establishes preventive controls that secure identities, systems, and data, helping organizations reduce risk and minimize the impact of potential cyber threats.
- Detect: Monitors identity activity and access patterns in real time to identify anomalous behavior, potential compromise, and unauthorized actions that may signal cyber threats.
- Respond: Provides the framework for analyzing, containing, and mitigating cybersecurity incidents while coordinating communications and response activities across the organization.
- Recover: Establishes the capabilities and processes needed to restore affected assets and services, supporting business continuity and ongoing operational resilience.
The key takeaway here is that NIST CSF 2.0 reinforces the need for identity security to be continuous, integrated, and operational. Not periodic or siloed.
I’ve spoken with CISOs across both regulated and non-regulated industries, and a common theme has emerged: identity is no longer just an IT function — it’s become mission-critical to business operations. One multinational travel and hospitality provider described identity as a foundational dependency for everything from customer services to workforce access. As identity environments became more complex, security leaders recognized that a lack of visibility and recovery readiness created both operational and governance risk. By adopting a unified security management approach, the organization gained deeper insight into identity activity, strengthened resilience, and reduced potential recovery times from days to hours. In highly regulated environments, that kind of improvement can make the difference between a manageable incident and a significant compliance or business disruption event.
From identity management to identity intelligence
To align with this model, CISOs must shift from traditional identity management to identity intelligence. This means moving from static governance to dynamic, real-time insight; from periodic audits to continuous monitoring and response; and from siloed tools to integrated security platforms. This is not just a technology shift — it is an operational one.
Putting identity-centric security into action
Forward-looking organizations in regulated industries are consolidating around security management platforms that unify identity across the NIST lifecycle, bringing together capabilities that address each stage:
- Identify and Detect: Establishing a unified view across human and non-human identities, with continuous, real-time insight into behavior, access changes, and emerging threats.
- Protect and Respond: Enforcing coordinated controls and enabling automated, identity-driven response actions to contain risk as it arises.
- Recover: Rapidly restoring identity systems and access states as part of an integrated process, not a separate or reactive function.
- Govern: Ensuring consistent policy enforcement, oversight, and alignment with regulatory requirements and frameworks.
This integrated model provides the context, continuity, and control required to manage identity risk across the full lifecycle. These are capabilities that fragmented point solutions cannot deliver.
Strategic priorities for CISOs
As identity becomes the control plane, security leaders in regulated industries should focus on five priorities:
- Treat all identities as critical assets. Human, machine, and AI identities must be governed equally.
- Shift to continuous monitoring by replacing periodic certification with real-time identity visibility and analytics.
- Consolidate into platforms by adopting integrated solutions that span governance, detection, response, and recovery.
- Align to frameworks like NIST CSF 2.0 and use them as frameworks to operationalize identity security across the lifecycle.
- Evaluate platform providers not only on functionality but also on demonstrated compliance and resilience credentials. For organizations operating in regulated sectors, certifications and authorizations such as FedRAMP High can provide additional confidence that security programs align with stringent operational and regulatory requirements.
The path forward
Identity security is no longer a compliance exercise. It has become the foundation of trust in modern enterprises. Within regulated industries, the urgency is even greater. As identity environments grow more complex and autonomous, the ability to continuously see, manage, and recover from identity risk will define security effectiveness.
The organizations that succeed will be those that move early, align to frameworks like NIST CSF 2.0, and invest in platforms that deliver unified, real-time identity security. Increasingly, those organizations are also prioritizing solutions that can demonstrate proven compliance against rigorous frameworks such as FedRAMP High, recognizing that security, resilience, and regulatory assurance are becoming inseparable requirements in modern identity security programs.
Because in today’s environment, the question is no longer who has access. It is whether security leaders can govern, detect, and respond to identity risk as it happens.
