Point-in-Time Checks No Longer Work

ISRA is designed as the critical first step toward continuous identity security. It gives organizations a clear, prioritized view of their highest-impact identity risks – creating the foundation needed to move from one-off assessments to an ongoing security improvement program.

“For years, organizations focused primarily on managing human identities,” said Morey Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust. “Today, machine identities, secrets, and AI agents often outnumber people by orders of magnitude, creating new attack paths that security teams struggle to see. Understanding who has access is no longer enough. Organizations need visibility into who has access, how those privileges connect, and where threat actors can exploit those relationships to move laterally through an environment.“

Our industry analysts increasingly view non-human identities as one of the fastest-growing enterprise security challenges. As organizations adopt cloud-native architectures, automation platforms, and AI-driven workflows, service accounts, APIs, machine identities, and AI agents continue to expand the identity attack surface beyond traditional human access controls.

The challenge is not unique to any single organization.

Security teams across industries are struggling to maintain visibility into increasingly fragmented identity ecosystems that span cloud environments, SaaS platforms, hybrid infrastructure, and autonomous AI workflows. As a result, identity security has become a foundational component of broader cyber resilience initiatives.

Disconnected Systems Create Hidden Attack Paths

Identity risk is increasingly difficult to understand across cloud, SaaS, hybrid infrastructure, and AI-driven automation using traditional approaches. Human users, service accounts, secrets, non-human identities, and AI agents often live across disconnected systems. This creates access relationships that are rarely visible through a single tool or team.

Attackers are exploiting these hidden connections. They do not just target individual accounts.

Rather, they navigate identity contexts as interconnected privilege channels, discovering unobserved indirect paths to increased access.

Security operations teams often lack the identity context they need to effectively prioritize and fix risk.

The enhanced Identity Security Risk Assessment tackles these problems through a five-pillar framework that helps organizations spot hidden attack paths, understand effective privilege, uncover emerging AI-related risks, and align remediation with established security frameworks and how teams actually work.

The Five-Pillar Framework That Makes Identity Risk Clear

The updated assessment groups findings across five analytical pillars built to help organizations understand and prioritize identity risk:

Environment Overview

Gives you one unified view of human, non-human, and AI identities across connected infrastructure, cloud, and SaaS environments. It also flags lifecycle and access hygiene problems.

True Privilege

Shows hidden privilege escalation paths, indirect access relationships, and cross-domain attack paths that traditional identity management tools usually miss.

Security Themes

Spot common identity hygiene risks like dormant privileged accounts, exposed credentials, excessive permissions, password-related risks, and joiner-mover-leaver gaps.

Emerging Trends and AI Security

The inclusion of AI security reflects growing concern among CISOs over the rapid deployment of generative and agentic AI systems inside enterprise environments. Security leaders are increasingly evaluating how AI agents access sensitive data, interact with business systems, and manage credentials without introducing new governance risks.

Highlights new identity risks related to the use of agentic AI, such as exposed secrets, unauthenticated models, and shadow AI agents.

Findings Explorer

Brings detections and recommendations together in one interface with risk scores. Recommendations map to NIST 800-53 and MITRE ATT&CK frameworks, helping organizations move from discovery to remediation and strengthening alignment between identity and security operations teams.

Effective Privilege Goes Far Beyond What Roles Show

Industry observers note that identity-related attacks increasingly rely on privilege chaining rather than direct compromise. Attackers frequently leverage a combination of excessive permissions, misconfigured service accounts, exposed credentials, and lateral movement opportunities to escalate access across enterprise environments. This trend has increased demand for tools that can visualize effective privilege and hidden access relationships.

“What consistently surprises organizations is how much effective privilege exists beyond direct role assignments,” said Jason Silva, Principal Solutions Architect at BeyondTrust. Accounts that appear low risk on paper often have indirect access paths through nested groups, delegated permissions, cloud entitlements, or connected applications. By helping organizations visualize those relationships, the enhanced assessment provides a clearer understanding of where identity risk exists and which exposures should be prioritized first.“

Real Customer Results

Organizations using BeyondTrust Identity Security Insights are already leveraging these capabilities to uncover previously unknown identity risks and prioritize remediation efforts.

“We had Pathfinder for one week,” said Shannon Anderson, VP, BISG Security Engineering – Identity and Access Management at Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. “The AI traced a nested AD group granting local admin, accurately, at a depth we couldn’t do manually. It surfaced accounts with no owner that we had no idea existed. But what it really did was give us a way to prioritize. We resolved the highest-risk issues, and we’re in a much stronger defensive position now. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.“

BeyondTrust’s Broader Vision for Identity Security

The enhanced assessment builds on BeyondTrust’s broader vision for simplifying identity security operations.

Following the recent introduction of PathfinderAI, BeyondTrust continues to expand the ways organizations can discover, understand, and act on identity risk across increasingly complex environments.

For security teams drowning in identity data but starving for actionable insight, this update moves identity risk assessment from a checkbox exercise to a continuous, prioritized security program that actually keeps pace with how attackers move through modern environments.

As identity ecosystems continue to grow in complexity, security leaders are increasingly shifting from periodic audits toward continuous identity risk management. The growing volume of machine identities, cloud entitlements, and AI-driven automation is prompting organizations to seek more comprehensive approaches for understanding effective privilege, identifying attack paths, and reducing identity-based risk.

Research and Intelligence Sources: BeyondTrust 

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