New research from Rubrik Zero Labs has uncovered a troubling gap between the expanding identity attack surface and organisations’ ability to recover from resulting compromises.
The security and AI operations vendor's report,
'Identity Crisis: Understanding & Building Resilience Against Identity-Driven Threats', warns that the wave of AI agents washing over government and corporate workplaces equates to a surge of both non-human identities (NHIs) and agentic identities - and is resulting in an urgent need for CIOs and CISOs to identity threats and recovery strategies.
Rubrik's report shows that as AI adoption expands across organisations worldwide, enterprises are taking decisive action to strengthen identity resilience.
Illustrating this trend:
- 89% of organisations plan to hire professionals within the next 12 months specifically to manage or improve identity management, infrastructure, and security.
- 87% of IT and security leaders actively plan to change Identity and Access Management (IAM) providers or have already begun the process.
- 58% cite security concerns as the primary driver to switch IAM providers.
"The rise of identity-driven attacks is changing the face of cyber defence," said Kavitha Mariappan, Rubrik's Chief Transformation Officer. "Managing identities in the era of AI has become a complex endeavour, especially with the labyrinth of NHIs.
"We have an under-the-radar crisis on our hands, whereby a single compromised credential can grant full access to an organisation's most sensitive data. Attackers are no longer breaking in, but
logging in.
"Comprehensive identity resilience is absolutely critical to cyber recovery in this new landscape."
Agentic AI Opens the Door to New Identity Challenges
As organisations integrate agents into their workflows, NHIs will continue to outpace the growth of human identities.
Industry reports contend that NHIs now outnumber human users by 80 to 1.
Mariappan contends that "securing NHIs will become as essential as securing human identities - if not more so - given the growing complexity of managing AI agent operations."
Rubrik’s research found that:
89% of respondents have fully or partially incorporated AI agents into their identity infrastructure, and an additional 10% have plans to do so.
Over half of IT security decision makers (58%) estimate that in the next year, 50% or more of the cyberattacks they deal with will be driven by agentic AI.
Weakening Confidence in Recovery Strategies Highlights Need for Identity Resilience
With identities the keys to access an organisation’s most sensitive data, IT and security leaders must build resilient identity services and infrastructures to ensure a quick recovery and restoration of operations in the face of an attack, Mariappan says.
Yet overall confidence in recovery times is declining at a rapid rate, according to the company's research:
- In 2025, only 28% of respondents believed they could fully recover from a cyber incident in 12 hours or less, compared to 43% in 2024.
- Over half (58%) of respondents believe it would take at least two days to recover and achieve full-service operations, post-compromise.
- Of those who experienced a ransomware attack in the past year, 89% paid a ransom to recover their data or stop the attack.
Organisational concern over the state of identity security is valid, and IAM tools alone are not enough to properly address these challenges. CIOs and CISOs need a comprehensive identity resilience strategy for when, not if, an attack strikes.
Research Methodology
The Rubrik Zero Labs Survey was conducted by an external research firm and surveyed 1,625 IT security decision-makers at companies with 500 or more employees. The research was conducted with a 50/50 split between Directors/VPs and CIOs/CISOs.
The research was conducted in three regions: the U.S., EMEA (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands), and APAC (Japan, Australia, Singapore, India).
Surveys were completed between September 18 and September 29, 2025, using an email invitation and an online survey.
About Rubrik
Rubrik is a security and AI operations company leading at the intersection of data protection, cyber resilience, and enterprise AI acceleration.
Rubrik Security Cloud delivers complete cyber resilience by securing, monitoring, and recovering data, identities, and workloads across clouds.
Rubrik Agent Cloud accelerates trusted AI agent deployments at scale by monitoring and auditing agentic actions, enforcing real-time guardrails, fine-tuning for accuracy, and undoing agentic mistakes.
