Commvault has released findings from an IDC white paper that point to a widening gap between enterprise AI adoption and the identity management capabilities required to support it securely.

The research, based on a survey of 539 IT and cyber resilience decision-makers in North America, found that 90% of respondents believe their organizations need stronger identity management capabilities to address risks associated with agentic AI systems. Approximately 85% of respondents said they had experienced a cyber incident.

According to the report, the increasing use of AI agents is driving growth in non-human identities, which can operate continuously and scale rapidly. These identities are expected to become increasingly important to secure as organizations expand AI deployments.

Key findings from the research include:

• 58.7% of respondents said their identity management approach requires significant improvements or a complete overhaul.
• Only 26.7% have implemented dynamic role-based access controls designed to support AI and analytics.
• Only 24.7% have documented and tested procedures to protect, detect compromise of, and recover identity services such as Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID.
• 98.4% believe collaboration between IT and security teams needs improvement, with 49.7% indicating that major improvements are required.

The study also identified broader cyber resilience challenges. More than 57% of respondents reported that their organizations have not fully defined a minimum viable business—the essential systems and processes needed to maintain operations during a major disruption. The report highlights additional gaps in recovery orchestration, cleanroom capabilities, and overall cyber resilience preparedness.

IDC describes Resilience Operations (ResOps) as an emerging operational discipline that brings together business, security, infrastructure, data protection, and recovery teams to improve organizational readiness and recovery from cyber incidents. According to the research, ResOps is expected to become a mainstream enterprise capability over the next three to five years.

Alongside the research, Commvault announced the IDC Cyber Readiness Assessment, an assessment tool based on the study’s maturity framework that enables organizations to evaluate their cyber resilience across identity management, protection, detection, response, and recovery capabilities.

The survey covered 539 enterprise organizations across North America, with 80% of respondents based in the United States and 20% in Canada. Participants included senior IT decision-makers and C-level executives responsible for cyber resilience strategy.

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