Identity security & data visibility key for cyber resilience

Experts across the technology sector are emphasising the critical importance of identity security and data visibility as core pillars in strengthening organisational cyber resilience during Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025.

Traditional advice such as avoiding password reuse and being wary of phishing attacks remains relevant, but cybersecurity leaders argue that these practices are no longer sufficient against evolving threats. The growing complexity of digital environments, fuelled by proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and increasing reliance on machine identities, is shifting the centre of security strategies towards identity management and visibility.

Identity as the cornerstone

Nam Lam, Group Vice President for Australia and New Zealand at SailPoint, highlights that identity security now serves as the control plane for enterprise security.

Identity has evolved. Once considered a back-office function, it's now the control plane of enterprise security. It governs access, enforces trust, and enables real-time decisions across a growing web of users, systems, APIs, AI agents, and machine identities. The perimeter isn't where it used to be. It now starts and ends with identity.

Lam references findings from the Horizons of Identity Security 2025-26 report, which suggest that investment in identity security offers the highest return on investment among security initiatives for many organisations. According to the report, high-maturity organisations are not only lowering risk but also reducing cyber insurance premiums, reducing identity-related incidents, and in some cases, eliminating large numbers of risky account configurations.

Despite these gains, many companies are lagging in managing non-human or machine identities, which in many enterprises now outnumber human users ten to one. Lam notes that less than 40% of organisations have real-time visibility into these machine identities, while most lack sufficient policy controls over AI agents that operate at scale.

Gaps in machine identity management

Robert Marolda, Director of Enterprise & Public Sector Sales ANZ at CyberArk, observes that the surge in machine identities, spurred by advances in AI, cloud computing and automation, has created an expanding and often ungoverned attack surface for organisations.

With a third of machine identities holding privileged or sensitive access, even something as simple as an expired TLS certificate can cause major business disruption. To stay ahead of escalating threats, organisations must treat machine identities with the same urgency as human ones by embedding privileged access management into an integrated identity security strategy that spans the entire business - ensuring visibility, reducing risk and maintaining operational efficiency.

Marolda stresses that fragmented strategies and siloed tools are compounding the risk, making it harder for security teams to maintain awareness of which entities - human or machine - have access to critical assets.

The challenge of unifying security data

Adam Beavis, Vice President & Country Manager at Databricks Australia, identifies fragmentation of security data as a fundamental problem undermining many enterprises' cybersecurity efforts.

Security teams frequently operate with "fragmented tools and legacy systems", according to Beavis, resulting in persistent data siloes. This forces security staff to make trade-offs such as restricting data collection, slowing down incident investigations, or operating with incomplete visibility. Each compromise limits threat detection and incident response effectiveness, increasing an organisation's exposure.

Beavis advocates for organisations to focus on eliminating these siloes and building unified, contextualised telemetry and real-time intelligence across all parts of the IT environment. Doing so, he says, will better equip risk teams to detect hidden risks and adapt to fast-evolving threats.

Balancing AI innovation and security

Mick McCluney, ANZ Field Chief Technology Officer at Trend Micro, points out that the rise of AI adoption in enterprises is introducing novel risks, including data poisoning, model manipulation, and adversarial attacks.

McCluney advises organisations to apply the same security discipline to AI deployments as they would to other critical infrastructure. This includes securing data pipelines, continuously monitoring for manipulations or drifts in model performance, and rigorously applying access controls-both to AI models and the datasets they learn from.

He also notes the importance of robust governance frameworks, aligned with regulatory requirements, in establishing accountability and trust for AI-driven projects. Embedding security from the outset is essential in ensuring that innovation does not come at the cost of increased vulnerability.

Culture matched by capability

The theme for this year's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, "Building our cyber safe culture", is widely supported by industry experts, but they caution that culture must be underpinned by capabilities that match the realities of today's threat landscape. Lam asserts that treating identity security as core infrastructure-rather than a 'tick-the-box' compliance activity-is the shift being made by resilient organisations.

Larger enterprises that are embracing identity-first architectures and automating identity governance benefit from enhanced detection and rapid response to identity-related threats, according to commentary. This transition is increasingly seen as essential as companies navigate rising operational risk, more frequent audit failures, and significant increases in cyber insurance premiums.

As cyber threats continue to evolve in scale and sophistication, experts maintain that strengthening identity management, breaking down siloes in security operations, and embedding security into all aspects of technology adoption-particularly AI-are vital steps for organisations seeking long-term resilience.