01 Growing Extension of IAM to Machine and Non-Human Identities The identity and access management market is expanding beyond employee accounts as enterprises need to authenticate APIs, containers, workloads, IoT devices, service accounts, and other machine identities. Traditional IAM systems were primarily designed around people, but cloud-native environments can contain substantially more non-human identities than human users. Organizations therefore need automated credential management, continuous validation, and access policies covering every digital entity. Machine identity management is becoming an important part of identity and access management market trends. In November 2025, IBM introduced Machine Identity Management capabilities to strengthen IAM for non-human identities. The company reported that machine identities now outnumber human identities by more than 40 to 1, demonstrating the scale of identity governance required across modern IT environments.
02 Increasing Adoption of Sovereign Identity Infrastructure Organizations operating in government, healthcare, financial services, and critical infrastructure increasingly require identity platforms that provide greater control over where identity information is stored and processed. This approach addresses regulatory, availability, and data-residency requirements. Sovereign deployment is consequently expanding the identity and access management industry toward more flexible infrastructure models. In March 2026, RSA launched ID Plus Sovereign Deployment with a new deploy-anywhere architecture. The platform combines 3 core identity capabilities—multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, and access management—while allowing organizations to maintain greater control over identity infrastructure and data residency.
01 Rising Identity-Based Cyberattacks Increase Demand for Privileged Access Controls Attackers increasingly target credentials, privileged accounts, and poorly configured access policies because compromised identities can provide direct entry into critical applications and cloud environments. Organizations are therefore strengthening privileged-access controls and monitoring user activity throughout the identity attack lifecycle. Unified identity security can reduce lateral movement after an initial account compromise and restrict unnecessary privileges. Increasing identity-based attacks are therefore strengthening identity and access management market demand.
01 Complexity of Governing AI Agents Creates Implementation Burdens Existing IAM environments were largely designed around predictable human users and conventional software identities. This additional complexity can restrain identity and access management market growth as organizations determine how to incorporate autonomous identities safely.
01 Expansion of Dedicated Governance for AI Agent Identities AI agents provide a distinct opportunity for IAM vendors because every autonomous agent requires an identifiable owner, controlled permissions, credential management, lifecycle governance, and visibility into the resources it can access. Treating agents as first-class identities allows organizations to extend established governance principles to rapidly growing AI environments. Vendors capable of discovering and governing these identities can therefore address a new enterprise security category. AI-agent governance can help providers increase identity and access management market share.
01 Maintaining Visibility Across Rapidly Expanding AI Identity Environments AI agents are particularly challenging because they can be created quickly, receive broad permissions, and operate across multiple systems without behaving like conventional users. Incomplete inventories can leave organizations unaware of which agents exist or what information they can access.
June 2026 Okta launched new AI-powered identity security capabilities, including enhanced Identity Threat Protection and Identity Governance features, strengthening enterprise protection against identity-based cyber threats.
April 2026 Microsoft expanded the Microsoft Entra portfolio with new identity governance and privileged access management capabilities, helping organizations strengthen Zero Trust security and regulatory compliance.
December 2025 CyberArk acquired Zilla Security, expanding its identity governance and administration (IGA) capabilities to deliver a more comprehensive identity security platform for enterprises.
October 2025 Ping Identity introduced advanced decentralized identity and verifiable credential capabilities, enabling organizations to strengthen secure digital identity verification and passwordless authentication.