Identity security in 2025: Zilla's insights & predictions

Zilla Security has laid out a series of predictions for the year 2025, focusing on the challenges and developments in identity security, governance, and regulatory compliance.

Deepak Taneja, CEO and Co-founder of Zilla Security, highlighted a major trend in identity security, which he refers to as the "Cat and Mouse Game." According to Taneja, "In 2025, identity security will reach an inflection point as attackers focus on exploiting overlooked dependencies in identity ecosystems, such as interlinked machine identities that create excessive entitlements. While organizations have made strides in managing secrets like credentials and certificates, the rapid growth of interconnected systems will present new vulnerabilities. Attackers are now targeting overlooked configurations and shared resources to bypass traditional defenses."

He further explained, "CISOs must shift their strategies from simply managing secrets to actively identifying dependencies that create excessive entitlements, leveraging AI to ease the management and monitoring of identity entitlements to preempt attacks, and developing playbooks for quickly remediating stolen secrets. The future of identity security will depend on not just controlling credentials and managing entitlements, but anticipating where attackers will strike next."

Nitin Sonawane, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Zilla Security, discussed the dual role of AI in identity governance. "In 2025, AI and machine learning (AI/ML) will drive a change in identity governance, automating complex processes like role management and access reconciliation. These technologies will analyze historical data and usage patterns to make a meaningful dent to the manual tasks required and the frequent rubber stamping. AI will predict access related risks and help mitigate them," Sonawane stated.

He issued a caution as well, noting, "However, the growing footprint of AI/ML across the enterprise introduces new risks: opaque decision-making models can make it impossible to predict which users can see what data and compromised AI systems could magnify vulnerabilities. CISOs need to implement robust governance systems to maintain oversight for critical access decisions, and govern AI projects across the enterprise to reduce the risk of data loss. AI/ML promises significant efficiency gains but must be deployed within secure, transparent frameworks to realize its full potential."

Mark Jaffe, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Zilla Security, highlighted the anticipated surge in identity governance and administration (IGA) adoption. "2025 will mark a record-breaking year for identity governance and administration (IGA) deployments, driven by a perfect storm of resource constraints, regulatory demands, and hybrid IT complexity. Many organizations face operational fatigue from managing fragmented identity processes across legacy on-premises and modern cloud systems," Jaffe explained.

"This breaking point will prompt a shift from the long acceptance of manual identity governance process to identifying automation to reduce the growing burden on identity security and governance teams," he added. Jaffe advised, "To capitalize on this moment, CISOs must prioritize tools that offer fast-time-value, unified visibility across highly distributed environments, pre-integrated workflows to accelerate deployment, and modular designs that scale with future needs. Expect IGA to evolve from a niche IT tool to a foundational element of enterprise-wide risk and compliance management, addressing not just IT needs but broader operational resilience."

Ryan Burke, Vice President of Sales at Zilla Security, forecasted an expansion of regulatory complexity across various industries. "In 2025, we'll see a surge in identity-related regulatory requirements across both new and traditionally regulated industries. Sectors like retail, aviation, and logistics will adopt identity compliance mandates, while existing industries like finance and healthcare will face increasing scrutiny at regional and state levels," noted Burke.

He pointed out consequences for compliance management, stating, "For CISOs, this means compliance will no longer be a contained IT issue—it will require enterprise-wide coordination and automation to scale. Identity governance solutions must evolve to deliver real-time compliance status, centralized audit readiness, and flexible frameworks to adapt to overlapping mandates. To stay ahead, CISOs should form cross-functional compliance teams and implement proactive monitoring tools to detect non-compliance before regulators do."