Solving the Identity Crisis: Okta Redefines Security in a Machine-Led World
In an increasingly AI-driven digital landscape, one truth is becoming abundantly clear: The world is facing an identity crisis. Not a philosophical one, but a security crisis fueled by the exponential growth of non-human identities — AI agents, service accounts and automation tools now outnumber human users in many organizations by as many as 90 to 1.
Okta is stepping forward with its boldest platform evolution yet, aiming to unify identity across human and machine actors, and extend zero-trust all the way from cloud to on-premises. This isn’t just another product update, it’s a fundamental rethinking of identity as infrastructure, built for a future where AI will act, speak and make decisions on our behalf.
In my discussions with Shiv Ramji, President of Auth0 at Okta, and Sandeep Kumbhat, Okta’s Global Field CTO, it became clear that this launch is as much about customer empathy as it is about innovation. Their combined vision underscores one of cybersecurity’s most significant truths: You can’t secure what you can’t see, and identity is at the core. “To get security right, you must get identity right,” Ramji said.
Identity is Security’s Front Door
As organizations adopt more SaaS tools, shift to hybrid work and experiment with generative AI, the number of identity endpoints skyrockets. But while humans log in and log out, machines don’t always follow the same rules. They create service accounts, spin up tokens and retain access often long after they’re needed and with more privilege than is required for the tasks they perform. “The attack surface is increasing exponentially,” Ramji said. “And identity is sitting at the root of that expansion.”
This isn’t just about usernames and passwords anymore. It’s about machine-to-machine authentication, delegated permissions and credentials that live in code instead of a human resources database. It’s where most attacks begin early in a kill chain. And without clear identity governance, it’s where successful and highly damaging breaches are born.
Reducing the Fuel Behind Security Wildfires
Today’s expanding identity risks mirror the conditions behind wildfires. Fires only spread when three things are present: Heat, oxygen and fuel. In cybersecurity, the attacker is the spark, the network is the oxygen, and human and non-human identity permissions (especially overprivileged or orphaned identities) are the fuel. And these non-human identities are an attacker’s dream target early in a kill chain. “Okta’s goal is to remove the fuel from the equation very early in a kill chain, limiting the potential for a security attack to start and certainly reducing the likelihood of a kill chain progressing undetected at speed,” Kumbhat shared. “We are an organization’s proactive wildfire prevention, and this begins with full and real-time visibility of human and non-human identities, the latter being a massive and fast-growing blind spot in every IT ecosystem.”
Kumbhat shared a real-world example where a customer discovered, through Okta’s new identity posture management capabilities, that former employees were still using cloud credentials months after leaving the company. Okta’s innovation, combined with its commitment as a technology and security partner, helped resolve the issue enterprise-wide.
“You can’t secure what you don’t know or don’t see,” Kumbhat said. “Once you gain full visibility, you can clean it up and proactively manage and govern all identities. Okta’s platform has innovative technology and critical integrations, but also, we are an invested partner with our customers to ensure the success of their mission from day one.”
Introducing Okta “Auth for GenAI”
At the center of Okta’s innovation push is a new suite of capabilities called Auth for GenAI, designed to secure AI agents and the infrastructure they rely on. Auth for GenAI delivers the identity backbone developers need to build secure, scalable AI-driven applications. Identity is not just about securing human users anymore and this offering from Okta extends enterprise-grade identity to AI agents and fits naturally into today’s GenAI ecosystems. With built-in support for frameworks like Langchain, LlamaIndex, Google GenKit and Vercel.ai, developers can build fast without compromising trust.
At the heart of it all is a commitment to control, oversight and responsible deployment:
- Authentication for GenAI ensures AI agents verify user identities before taking actions with shortcuts and no assumptions. This brings foundational IAM principles into autonomous agent workflows.
- Token Vault replaces hardcoded and difficult-to-manage credentials with a secure vault for token storage and refresh, letting agents safely interact with systems like Gmail and Slack using OAuth 2.0 without exposing sensitive access.
- Asynchronous Authorization solves a long-overdue challenge: How to manage delayed, multi-step workflows where decisions might take hours or days. Human-in-the-loop approvals can be triggered exactly when needed, adding precision without friction.
- Fine-Grained Authorization for RAG gives developers the power to tailor what agents can access and when, ensuring they only retrieve what the user is permitted to see, and nothing more. It dynamically reflects business policies, compliance standards and real-time risk posture.
Okta’s innovative approach is not just smarter, it’s safer, and built for the next generation of applications that won’t have a human behind every click. Okta Auth for GenAI enables identity to keep pace with autonomous action.
“You’re not telling the agent to store your family’s preferences forever,” Ramji explained. “You’re saying, ‘For this task, you can access this data only as needed, when needed, and for the time needed,’ and that’s it. Ephemeral access and privilege as needed for both human and non-human identities. A huge step forward for security.”
Identity Visibility, Hygiene and Governance — The Heart of Okta’s Platform Innovations
Okta’s Auth for GenAI announcement is just one pillar in a broader platform evolution. Okta unveils major new capabilities that reflect their unified vision: Identity security isn’t complete unless it spans all identities, human and non-human alike. From employees to AI agents, shared accounts to API tokens, Okta is bringing all of it under one integrated roof.
The core of this transformation is a unified, end-to-end identity fabric, designed to extend zero-trust principles and intelligent governance across the full spectrum of identity types. With this platform update, businesses can finally gain the same level of visibility, automation and control over non-human identities as they do over their people.
These new platform capabilities enable the responsible deployment of AI in the enterprise. Ramji noted that while more than 80 percent of CIOs and CTOs say they’re experimenting with AI, far fewer are moving projects into production due to unresolved security and governance questions.
“We’re solving the access problem. We’re solving the privilege problem. And we’re solving the governance problem,” Ramji said. “And underneath all of that is constant visibility, monitoring and observability.”
New capabilities include:
- Identity Security Posture Management and Okta Privileged Access are two foundational capabilities that give organizations real-time visibility and control over non-human identities like service accounts, API keys and automation tokens. These tools continuously assess risk, enforce ephemeral access, and automatically remediate overprivileged accounts. They ensure AI agents and machine-to-machine interactions are governed with the same rigor as human users. As digital ecosystems expand, these capabilities are no longer optional—they’re essential for enterprise-grade trust.
- Separation of Duties (SoD) addresses a longstanding challenge: Conflicting access rights that can lead to insider risk, fraud, or non-compliance. With Okta SoD, organizations can define and enforce policies that prevent users, especially those in regulated industries or high-risk roles, from accumulating toxic permission combinations. It’s a critical enhancement for organizations with growing entitlements, sprawling access paths and increasingly complex compliance requirements.
- Secure Device Features integrate device context and hardware protections to combat credential theft and reduce MFA fatigue. These capabilities work with the broader Okta ecosystem, ingesting contextual signals from a customer’s security stack to enforce zero-trust policies at the device layer.
- On-Prem Connector that bridges the gap between legacy systems and modern identity governance. This out-of-the-box connector brings deep visibility and entitlement management into on-prem application systems that have historically been blind spots for identity programs.
- Secure Identity Integrations (SII) dramatically deepens Okta’s application integration muscle. Now part of the Okta Integration Network, these pre-built integrations go well beyond SSO and provisioning. For applications like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, they now include advanced user privilege management, hidden risk detection and instant containment capabilities like universal logout and access revocation.
With this release, Okta isn’t just expanding its capabilities, it’s redefining what modern identity security means in a machine-led world. The platform delivers a cohesive security posture across every environment and identity type. Whether it’s an AI agent querying sensitive systems, a contractor accessing a remote application, or a forgotten token quietly lurking in a CI/CD pipeline, Okta brings visibility, control and governance into one platform built for zero-trust, and ready for tomorrow’s automation. This is not identity bolted onto AI. It’s identity as infrastructure for everything, and everyone.
Okta and Supply Chain Defense
Identity risk extends far beyond an organization’s internal systems. The third-party technologies an organization uses also become part of its digital supply chain, and that’s another major concern for all customers.
“Supply chain security has become a base requirement in both public and private sectors for doing business,” Kumbhat said. “Many can’t win contracts, let alone get past round one of an RFP phase, if they cannot show the security of their supply chains. And the security of human and non-human identities is a large part of the digital supply chain security equation.
Okta’s approach to supply chain security starts with open standards and integration. Its foundation in open APIs and connectors allows frictionless and secure integration with IT and security tools that are already embedded in customer ecosystems and delivering value.
By integrating with solutions such as CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and others, Okta allows security events to flow freely across the stack. If one system detects a risk, such as malware or an unauthorized BIOS downgrade on a device, Okta can automatically adjust identity permissions or revoke access entirely.
“Okta is, at its core, an integration company,” Kumbhat said. “We were built to plug into ecosystems, not wall ourselves off. That’s what makes us essential to securing identities and, in turn, digital supply chains.”
Identity as Infrastructure
The message from both Ramji and Kumbhat is clear: Identity is no longer a login box or a compliance checkbox. It’s the foundation of digital trust and the frontline defense against tomorrow’s AI-powered attacks.
Okta’s new capabilities firmly reflect that shift. They are not only designed to protect today’s SaaS applications but also to future-proof enterprises for autonomous agents, distributed services and unseen machine-to-machine interactions.
For CISOs, developers, IT leaders, and frankly, the entire C-suite, this marks a turning point in how identity is managed, measured and secured at scale in a truly integrated and frictionless platform accessible to organizations of any size. “If you’re using one tool for privilege, one for governance and another for IAM, you’re creating and managing complexity,” said Ramji. “We’re bringing it all together in a truly integrated and frictionless platform.”
“Our role is to provide seamless and secure access so people can safely use any technology. Attackers target organizations of every size and type. Okta is the partner of choice for these organizations, not only for our technology but for our world-class partnership at every step of their security journey,” concluded Kumbhat.
As the digital world becomes increasingly autonomous and interconnected, Okta is planting its flag as the identity fabric that binds humans and machines together in security and trust. And for everyone, from developers at startups to healthcare professionals protecting infants in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), to families just like yours and mine booking a holiday through an AI assistant — that matters more than ever, now and into our future.
