Identity First Security: Why External Identities Are Becoming the New Cyber Resilience Frontier

Customer, partner, and machine identities are now the largest unmanaged attack surface.

Cybersecurity strategies were traditionally built around employees, devices, and internal networks. But today, organisations manage far more external identities than workforce identities - including customers, partners, APIs, services, and AI agents. In many cases, the ratio already exceeds 1:100.
Yet security architectures still focus primarily on workforce IAM. This session explores why external identities are becoming the new cyber resilience frontier, how identity-driven attacks are evolving, and why organisations must adopt an Identity First Security approach to secure digital ecosystems.