Our team just returned from Identiverse 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Between the innovative vendors, ground-breaking speakers and the caliber of attendees, we are excited to be a part of the future if Identities.
While the expo floor was buzzing with new tech and the panels didn’t disappoint, a few major themes stood out in a big way. If you’re in a leadership or CISO role, here are the top three shifts I saw—and what they mean for the road ahead.
1. AI in IAM Is Here (and It’s Not Waiting for You to Catch Up). Every major vendor showed some version of AI- or ML-driven identity insights: behavior analytics, access risk scoring, even AI-generated identity recommendations. It wasn’t all hype—there are real use cases showing value. The flip side? AI also introduces risk (think: opaque decisioning, bias, and attack surface expansion). Adversaries are weaponizing the same technology through deepfakes, voice cloning, and LLM-driven phishing.
CISO Takeaway: You’ll need both a strategy for adopting AI—and a plan for governing it. Don’t wait for compliance to catch up. Ensure it’s paired with explainability, human-in-the-loop oversight, and verification protocols. Assume your voice, image, and behavior can be convincingly faked—and plan internal processes accordingly.
2. Identity Resilience Is the New Perimeter. Breaches aren’t just about prevention anymore. Once a side conversation, identity resilience is now front and center. This year’s sessions emphasized post-breach survivability: can your org roll back, restore identity, and resume operations after compromise? After several high-profile incidents in 2023 and 2024, more orgs are realizing that IAM systems aren’t just about authentication—they’re business-critical infrastructure. The message from the stage was clear: if you can’t recover your identity layer quickly, your operations and business are at risk.
CISO Takeaway: It’s time to ask your team what “IAM resilience” actually looks like—and whether your org could bounce back from an identity outage. Implement immutable identity backups, test failover regularly, and treat identity like any other mission-critical system. If your IdP goes down, so does your business.
3. Identity as Operational Infrastructure. IAM isn’t just a security checkbox or an access gateway—it’s foundational infrastructure for business operations, agility, compliance, and user experience. The future: continuous, adaptive, invisible and resilient IAM.
Vendors, CISOs, and analysts repeatedly emphasized:
• Identity systems are tier 0 infrastructure.
• Outages in IAM = outages in business operations.
• Recovery, failover, and resilience planning for IAM are becoming board-level concerns.
This shift framed identity not just as a security enabler, but as a mission-critical layer, on par with network and cloud infrastructure. Identity fabric was often positioned as one possible tool to help with the complexity—but the urgency and strategic framing around IAM-as-infrastructure dominated.
CISO Takeaway: Treat IAM like your cloud or network stack. Invest in resilience, real-time recovery, and controls that work under pressure—not just under audit.
CIO Takeaway: When identity systems fail, operations stop. Make sure your leadership team understands IAM’s central role in business continuity.
CTO Takeaway: IAM maturity is now a strategic differentiator. Budget for it like you would core systems. Push for cross-functional accountability—identity affects HR, legal, sales, and customer trust, not just IT.
Final Thought: Identity Is the Strategy
If one thing became clear at Identiverse 2025, it’s this: identity isn’t just an IT function or a security project—it’s the connective tissue of digital business. The way we manage identity now shapes how we defend, how we operate, and how we grow.
AI is accelerating both risk and opportunity. Resilience is no longer optional—it’s expected. And identity has moved from backend system to strategic control plane.
But beyond the sessions and keynotes, what stood out most was the energy. Identiverse 2025 was more than just a conference—it was a gathering of the brightest minds in identity. It was a chance to reconnect with old friends, make new ones, and share real-world challenges and bold ideas. The hallway conversations were just as powerful as the panels—full of humility, urgency, and innovation.
This year, Identiverse didn’t just deliver—it inspired. And for CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs, the message was clear: the future of identity is real-time, resilient, and mission-critical.
Let’s go make our identities mighty.
