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Hey {{first_name | Jedi}} , welcome to the 115th of the Identity Jedi Newsletter. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Listen it’s 8 days in, so it still counts..lol. I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, I took some much needed time off to enjoy the holiday season with friends and family, and I hope you did the same! But now, it’s 2026 and I’m ready to gear up and talk all things identity. We’ve got some MASSIVE things coming to the Identity Jedi Universe THIS MONTH! So get ready folks, 2026 is going to be the best year yet!
Let’s get to the good stuff!
Table of Contents
Let’s Talk Platform
Let’s really talk about what it means to have an all encompassing identity security platform. One ring to rule them all, if you will. We’ve seen the pattern in technology for decades now and well, quite frankly it’s kinda worked. ( Depends on who you ask) But we are quickly racing towards building the monolithic identity platform that encompasses all of your needs and I’m wondering if we are considering what the really looks like? Think about how much identity is woven into the fabric of how we do our everyday jobs. It’s the invisible thing that just allows us to work that we don’t think about. I mean yes, we think about it, because it’s our day jobs, but the average user doesn’t. Right now if your PAM system goes down for the day, it’s an annoyance and yeah admins are upset, but the business will still run. If your governance system stops, you can’t run an access campaign, can’t request for new things, can’t provision or deprovision access, but again the business till runs. But if you can’t authenticate, or authorize, well now you’ve got some problems. And if all of those systems are now one system….
This isn’t a new concept here. We’ve had this debate for years when it comes to building secure architectures.
Yes it’s nice to have a single pane of glass, and everything in one place but you are also centralizing the one place an attacker needs to make sure you have a very bad day. So what does defense in depth look like when it comes to identity? How do you hot swap an authentication provider? Or an just-in-time authorization layer?
Food for thought.
CrowdStrike Acquires SGNL
And we kick of 2026 with a bang. Crowdstrike enters the chat talking talking that shit like Frank Lucas in in American Gangster
Giphy
$740 million for SGNL is a nice chunk of change. And while I’m genuinely happy for the SGNL crew—shout out to Ian, Atul, and the entire team—that number definitely makes you raise an eyebrow.
So let’s speculate for a minute.
We all knew CrowdStrike was going to make a move in identity. The writing’s been on the wall since last year, especially with the activity we saw from Palo Alto and ServiceNow. And if you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you’ve heard me yelling from the mountaintops that the consolidation wars have been underway for years.
We’re entering the late stages now.
Giphy
The smoke is starting to clear. There aren’t many serious players left on the board. But more importantly, the shape of the platforms is finally coming into focus.
This move by CrowdStrike screams immediate integration into the Falcon platform, with SGNL acting as the bridge between what security used to consider identity (endpoint-centric thinking) and what identity actually is: access, policy, context, and intent.
The real draw for CrowdStrike here is runtime enforcement. SGNL operates more like a smart authorization proxy (don’t kill me, Ian), which fundamentally changes the game. Take CrowdStrike’s massive telemetry across the environment and combine it with SGNL’s real-time identity context and enforcement—and now you’re cooking.
From a security and incident response perspective, that’s powerful.
Governance and compliance? Not so much—at least not in the traditional sense. But if you’re leaning into actual Zero Trust, there’s a strong argument that even those models start to shift. In this world, policies become the new entitlements.
And not just policies—human-readable policies.
Simple statements like:
David gets access to these folders for the next two weeks to work on the Janex project.
Sound familiar?
They look a lot like…prompts.
Prompts that express intent, users, actions, and data sources. Prompts you can correlate, quantify, enforce, and protect—all within a single platform.And that’s just looking at next-gen identity security inside CrowdStrike.
Now zoom out.
What happens when you start tying this into SIEM? Data pipelines? Workflow automation?
Things get interesting fast.
But hey—I’m just spitballing.
At the end of the day, the SGNL team gets a well-earned exit, CrowdStrike picks up some serious tech, and the industry marches one step closer to monolithic security platforms.
Your move, Cisco.
Industry News
Security teams and MSSPs are sounding the alarm on the exploding number of non-human identities (NHIs)—bots, APIs, and AI agents—that are outpacing traditional IAM models and governance controls. According to a ManageEngine report, this surge is forcing organizations to rethink identity security beyond human accounts, with NHIs becoming a dominant risk vector as AI adoption accelerates.
This industry roundup confirms what many teams are feeling in the field: identity is being asked to do more, faster, and with fewer excuses. Predictions point to increased focus on machine identities, adaptive access, and identity becoming the enforcement layer for Zero Trust—not just a policy checkbox.
As AI systems move from experimentation to production, IAM is being forced into a new role: governing autonomous behavior at scale. This piece highlights how AI workloads, copilots, and agents are exposing the limits of legacy access models built for humans and static roles.
Podcasts
The Last Word
It’s good to be back! Missed ya..I really did! Like I said some big changes coming to the Identity Jedi Universe this month. Here’s what’s coming: This weekend we are working on finalizing the changes to the Premium and Mastery sections of the website. E-books, Frameworks, and Identity Jedi AI access will be available and setup. Also we’ll be launching our video library of content..short videos on different topics in the Identity Security Space. Later this year we will be moving Identity Jedi University officially to this platform, we are just waiting on Beehiiv to officially roll out there course platform here. All content will be available for purchase to everyone, but obviously if you are a subscriber you get discounted access. Also..my book will be available for sell on the site as well. Additionally, for those of you interested in leadership, last year I started a leadership newsletter on LinkedIn, I’ll be creating another site specifically for that that coincides with my personal brand, so be on the look out for that as well
Yeah…that’s it for now…looking forward to an awesome year. Make sure to tell your friends, colleagues, enemies..( just kidding) about the newsletter let’s take this thing up another notch this year!
Be Good to each other, Be Kind to each other, Love each other