Agents Are Identities Too: Identity Security After CyberArk with Amy Blackshaw

Aaron (0:08)

Good morning, good evening wherever you are, and welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. This is your host, Aaron, and our topic this week is agents, identities, and security. Now, AI agents are multiplying across the enterprise, and attackers armed with AI can now go from an initial access to stolen data in about an hour. This week, Brandon sits down with Amy Blackshaw, SVP of Identity Marketing at Palo Alto Networks, to talk about zero standing privileges, securing agents as first-class identities, and why identity has become the control point for enterprise AI. And all of that is coming up right after this quick break.

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SPEAKER_2 (1:42)

Today's show is sponsored by Palo Alto Networks. Every time your team deploys a new cloud workload or AI agent, another identity gets permanent access to your critical systems. Legacy tools were built to manage human employees, leaving modern machine and AI access largely unmanaged. That's why Idira by Palo Alto Networks comes in. Human, machine, AI, one identity platform for all of them. Idira replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access, so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your business.

Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks. Visit paloaltonetworks.com/idira.

Again, that's paloaltonetworks.com/IDIRA.

Brandon (2:28)

And we're back. Joining me today is Amy Blackshaw, Senior Vice President, Identity Marketing, Palo Alto Networks. Welcome to the show, Amy

Amy Blackshaw (2:36)

Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here

Brandon (2:39)

Well, listen, as I was just saying, we're gonna talk about one of my favorite subjects, identity management, today. But before we get into that, we always like to learn a little bit about our guests and if you will hear your origin story. So how did you get to Palo Alto Networks? Tell us your story

Amy Blackshaw (2:54)

okay. That sounds great. I have been in cybersecurity for almost 20 years. I've spent most of that running product marketing across large vendors who are trying to help our customers solve very complex problems. The past four years I spent leading product marketing at a company called CyberArk, the leader and the pioneer of privileged access management. Hopefully, a lot of listeners have heard of CyberArk.

And as of February 2026, CyberArk became part of Palo Alto Networks when we were acquired. So I found myself at Palo Alto Networks leading marketing across the identity business unit under the new brand, Ideera. And we're very excited to bring CyberArk into the Palo Alto Networks fold. Get lots of innovation, lots of speed, lots of scale, and it's been just a great, fabulous experience thus far, and we're looking forward to continuing the thrust of identity security under Palo Alto Networks moving forward

Brandon (3:53)

Well, that's fantastic. It sounds-- And congratulations on the acquisition. Sounds sounds like it's going well, which is always good to hear.

I was, I s- I was mentioning before, like I really personally, have an affinity for identity management. I feel like sometimes it doesn't get as much love as it maybe should, but maybe that's just my own bias. But maybe for everybody, 'cause I think a lot of us, a lot of people get ex- are exposed to identity management without knowing it all the time, and all the things are going behind the scenes. So why don't you just level set for us, what exactly is identity management? And more importantly, like what are the problems that either people should know that are being solved or being solved maybe behind the scenes for them?

Amy Blackshaw (4:27)

Yeah, it's a great question, and I think there is a long history of identity management within sort of the IT confinement, where, you know, for a long time, identity was really about managing identities. And what does that mean? That means when you log in as an employee, you need to have the right credentials, the right entitlement in order to get access to the things that you need to do your job. And what does an IT team want to do? They wanna make sure you can do your job and not get in your way. So for a very long time, identity management was exactly that. It was about the management of identities from an operational perspective versus a security perspective.