New research from Rubrik Zero Labs uncovers a troubling gap between the expanding identity attack surface and organisations’ ability to recover from resulting compromises.
The AI wave is translating into an increase of AI agents in the workplace, which equates to a surge of both non-human identities (NHIs) and agentic identities. This is resulting in an urgent focus for CIOs and CISOs on identity threats and recovery.
The report — Identity Crisis: Understanding and Building Resilience Against Identity-Driven Threats — shows that as AI adoption expands across organisations worldwide, enterprises are taking decisive action to strengthen identity resilience.
“Attackers are now frequently targeting both human and non-human identities. It’s the fastest route to critical systems and data, fundamentally changing the face of Indian cyber defense,” said Ashish Gupta, Managing Director, India and Head of Engineering at Rubrik.
“For Indian organisations, which manage complex hybrid environments involving multiple identity providers (Active Directory, cloud IdPs, SaaS, and NHIs), this complexity creates numerous failure points. Identity systems and data are the two assets attackers most often exploit. Therefore, going beyond prevention, the key to true resilience is ensuring the rapid protection and recovery of both.”
“I could have unlimited amounts of technology in place. But if someone socially engineers our support desk to hand over admin passwords, that’s the end of the game, “ said Andrew Albrech, Chief Information Security Officer at Domino’s. “That’s why identity resilience is key.”
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. In fact, industry reports contend that NHIs now outnumber human users by 82-1. Securing NHIs will become as essential — if not more — as securing human identities, given the growing complexity of managing AI agent operations.
Rubrik’s research found that
86 per cent of respondents have fully or partially incorporated AI agents into their identity infrastructure, and an additional 12 percent have plans to. Over half of IT security decision makers (56 per cent) estimate that in the next year, 30 per cent or more of the cyberattacks they deal with will be driven by agentic AI.
In 2025, only 32 per cent of India respondents believed they could fully recover from a cyber incident in 12 hours or less.
While 34 per cent of Indian organisations believe that it would take more than two days to recover and achieve full-service operations post identity-based attack. Further 79 per cent of Indian organizations experienced a ransomware attack in the past year, 91 per cent paid a ransom to recover their data or stop the attack.
Globally, 89 per cent of organisations plan to hire professionals within the next 12 months specifically to manage or improve identity management, infrastructure, and security.
While 87 per cent of IT and security leaders actively plan to change Identity and Access Management (IAM) providers or have already begun the process, 58 per cent cite security concerns as the primary driver to switch IAM providers.
Rubrik (RBRK), the Security and AI Operations Company, leads 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.
