{"id":38272,"date":"2026-11-05T06:51:03","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T06:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/?p=38272"},"modified":"2026-11-05T08:54:44","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T08:54:44","slug":"meet-the-identerati-how-identity-security-became-a-cult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/blogs\/meet-the-identerati-how-identity-security-became-a-cult","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Identerati: How Identity Security Became a Cult"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thinking about identity, it&#8217;s ironic that my first encounter in New Zealand was about mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;d had this picture of New Zealand as a friendly nation with sheep running around the airport and everyone gently waving me a warm welcome as I breezed through border control. Welcome, Mr Fisher!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instead it was just like everywhere else. I got pulled up at the passport gate for not filling out the right form, then questioned on what exactly I was doing here and what sort of business I was in. Eventually I convinced her that it was quite normal for someone to fly this far to visit their marketing team. &#8220;See you later!&#8221; she said, in a mildly threatening way, as she stamped my passport. I still had to clear another two checkpoints to make sure I wasn&#8217;t bringing in any banned food, insects, or Australians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, not what I was expecting, my bad. But once you get out of the airport you begin to see why they&#8217;re so careful. The place is a kind of paradise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<p class=\"responsive-video-wrap clr\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Identity Security Has Become a Cult | Paul Fisher (Head of Global Strategy): Interview - Part 1\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2lM3FvEeIkc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway, to the point. Identity in the real world is a perfectly valid way to authenticate a person: based on the passport they hold and, of course, the travel history connected to it. You can see the person in front of you, and they check out. Subject to abuse and counterfeit, naturally, but modern tech has made that harder than it used to be. And in any case, the border guard I encountered would reduce any would-be sheep smuggler to a quivering wreck. The human touch. Though nothing compares to El Al security for making you want to confess to something you haven&#8217;t even done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But back to this identity, the world of IAM and authentication and all that jazz. When did it become such a blooming mess? A cult. A religion. A shibboleth, something that looks impossibly sophisticated and modern from the outside but is in fact built on fragile sand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\"><blockquote><p>&#8220;Identity asks who are you? Access asks a simpler, more honest question: what is about to happen on this machine, and should it?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was an analyst for ten years, mostly focused on IAM and then on PAM, both established, fairly down-to-earth acronyms for essential bits of cybersecurity. And while both have been thoroughly commoditised in the 21st century, the concepts behind them date back to the dawn of computing. To keep things secure, a user was granted a label and a password; some users were handed elevated access rights with much the same arrangement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It really is that old. In 1961, on MIT&#8217;s Compatible Time-Sharing System, a researcher named Fernando Corbat\u00f3 needed a way to stop people poking around in each other&#8217;s files on a shared mainframe. His solution was the password, the first time anyone had used one to protect access on a computer. It worked, more or less. It also took roughly two years for the trouble to start: a software glitch printed the entire password file out in plain text, and a graduate student who&#8217;d had his computer time rationed simply printed the list and helped himself to everyone else&#8217;s. The first password, and the first credential theft, inside the same decade. Corbat\u00f3, decades later, would call the whole thing &#8220;a nightmare.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s IAM&#8217;s origin story in miniature, a name, a secret, and someone already trying to steal it. PAM arrived not long after, out of the same family tree. Unix, a direct descendant of Corbat\u00f3&#8217;s later Multics project, introduced the idea of a single all-powerful account, root, that could do anything on the system. Ordinary users lived with limited rights; when they needed to do something powerful, they borrowed root&#8217;s identity through a tool called su, and later sudo. A privileged account, separate from the everyday one, accessed with credentials and meant to be used sparingly. Sixty years on, beneath all the platforms and frameworks, that is still essentially what Privileged Access Management is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I first started at the analyst firm KuppingerCole in 2019, it seemed as though the fundamentals pretty much still applied. It was binary, it was basic, and it relied on logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, as time went on, it became apparent to me that the science of securing access to computer systems had been taken over by a dreaded cult: the Identerati.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, this is not the group that likes to have a beer before every identity-related event, that&#8217;s the relatively benign social gathering known as Identibeer. But you do wonder what kind of drunken identity philosophy pours out of that event, given the tendency of identity conferences these days to be self-aggrandising, self-important and self-serving. At times, attending one feels a little like being at Jonestown in the hour before everyone drank the Kool-Aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because that, more or less, is what&#8217;s on the cards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The downside is that the coming of AI has only worsened the cod philosophising and the cult-like behaviour. The good news is that the coming of AI is also likely to demolish much of the current &#8220;thinking&#8221; about identity and its place in the world of security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m predicting the end of identity at the centre. The end of Identity Fabrics. The end of the identity love-ins, as one exhibitor described EIC 2026 to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Have I been at my own homebrew Kool-Aid? Am I mad? Surely twenty years of PAM and IAM development, all of it putting identity front and centre of computer access, cannot be wiped out overnight?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But here&#8217;s the thing. The Identerati have been discussing this for twenty years and still haven&#8217;t solved how to manage secure access through identity, not really, not past the many versions of sudo that keep getting reinvented under new names. They have spent that time talking to themselves: to other analysts, to vendors, about their own theories of IAM strategy and technology. And in all that talking, they failed to notice that much of the business world had stopped listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now the arrival of AI agents has the same crowd insisting that the existing theory still holds, that access governed by the permissions granted to a name in a directory can simply be extended, with much tweaking and argument, to AI agents. And of course anyone who has actually stopped to consider what an agent is, that it is not a human, knows that it cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\"><blockquote><p>&#8220;An agent is not a person. It has no single, stable, human identity to enrol, vault and govern.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So let me give you the positive version, because a takedown without an alternative is just complaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At Admin By Request we never talk about identity. We talk about access. It sounds like a small distinction, almost pedantic, but it is the whole argument. Identity asks who are you? and then spends twenty years and a conference circuit trying to answer it. Access asks a simpler, more honest question: what is about to happen on this machine, and should it? You do not need to resolve the metaphysics of an agent&#8217;s &#8220;identity&#8221; to answer that. You need to see the action and be standing at the door when it tries to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right now, that door is the endpoint. I&#8217;ll be straight about the limits of this: today, the place we can reliably stop a rogue or runaway AI agent is at the point where it tries to execute, to launch, to elevate, to touch the system. Not in a directory, not in a fabric, not in some abstract trust plane three layers up. At the endpoint, where the action is real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And here is the part I&#8217;m willing to put my name to: the eventual control of AI agents will not be built around identity at the centre. It can&#8217;t be. An agent is not a person. It has no single, stable, human &#8220;identity&#8221; to enrol, vault and govern, it is spun up, cloned, chained and discarded faster than any joiner-mover-leaver process was ever designed to track. The whole apparatus the Identerati spent two decades building assumes a human at the end of it. Take the human away and the apparatus has nothing to hold on to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You don&#8217;t have to take my word for it, the market is already drifting this way while still using the old vocabulary. The major endpoint platforms have quietly started prescribing zero standing privilege for agents at the endpoint, which is an identity-centric industry admitting, without quite saying so, that the answer lives at the point of action rather than in the directory. And the raw numbers make the human-identity model look quaint: in enterprises now running machine-to-human identity ratios of twenty-five to one and beyond, some past a hundred to one, the idea that you&#8217;ll govern all of it by giving each one a name and a set of permissions isn&#8217;t a strategy. It&#8217;s a fantasy with a roadmap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So no, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve been drinking my own Kool-Aid. I think I&#8217;ve just been standing outside the tent, watching a very clever group of people answer a question the world stopped asking. Identity had its twenty years at the centre. Access is what&#8217;s left when the agents arrive, and they&#8217;re already here. My identity didn&#8217;t allow me access to the golden hills of New Zealand, ironically an agent did!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Identity asks who you are, while access asks what is about to happen on a machine. Paul Fisher argues the second question is the only one AI agents answer to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":38274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[357,148,630,67,626,68],"ppma_author":[559],"class_list":["post-38272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","tag-admin-by-request","tag-cybersecurity","tag-identity-security","tag-pam","tag-paul-fisher","tag-privileged-access-management","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO Pro 5.0.5 - aioseo.com -->\n\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Identity asks who you are, while access asks what is about to happen on a machine. 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As Lead Analyst for PAM and IAM at KuppingerCole, he wrote the firm\u2019s benchmark PAM market research and moderated the PAM track at the European Identity and Cloud Conference. He\u2019s a regular speaker at major identity and cybersecurity events, and he advises organizations on PAM, IAM, and security platform implementations."}],"permalink_manager":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38272"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38278,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38272\/revisions\/38278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38272"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adminbyrequest.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=38272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}