In a Red Hot (And Crowded) Identity Security Market, Only One Company Is Standing Out

Identity security has become one of the most crowded corners of cybersecurity. Organizations have invested heavily in identity providers, governance platforms, privileged access management and authentication technologies, yet many still struggle with a basic question: Can those controls actually reach every application and identity inside the business?

The challenge is becoming more pronounced as enterprise environments grow more fragmented. Okta’s 2025 Businesses at Work report found that the average organization now uses 101 applications, surpassing 100 for the first time after years of remaining below that threshold. The number of applications grew 9% year over year, creating a broader environment that organizations need to secure and govern.

At the same time, identity remains a major security battleground. Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report found that 97% of identity attacks were password spray attacks, highlighting how frequently attackers continue to exploit weak or reused credentials. 

Similarly, Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that compromised credentials were an initial access vector in 22% of breaches analyzed. The report examined more than 22,000 security incidents, including 12,195 confirmed breaches, while third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30%. 

For security leaders, the message is increasingly clear: Buying sophisticated identity controls is one thing. Extending those controls across the entire environment is another. Way Security is building its strategy around that distinction, arguing that organizations often don’t need to replace their IAM infrastructure; they need to make it work across the applications and identities it currently cannot reach.

The Case for Making IAM Go Further

Way Security’s approach starts with an assumption that runs against the conventional playbook of enterprise security: Organizations may not need another identity platform.They may need a way to make the platforms they already own work everywhere.

The company’s universal integration and enablement layer is designed to connect existing IAM capabilities to applications and identities that typically fall outside the reach of standard integrations. That includes legacy systems, homegrown applications, disconnected environments, and non-standard technologies. Rather than asking organizations to rip and replace their existing identity stack, Way Security aims to extend it.

The potential significance is less about adding another tool to the security stack and more about addressing the economics of implementation. Every application that requires a custom integration can mean additional engineering work, extended deployment timelines, and another piece of infrastructure to maintain. Way Security’s proposition is that a universal layer can eliminate much of that one-off work, allowing security teams to apply existing identity governance and authentication controls without rebuilding the stack around every exception.

That matters as identity governance becomes more complex. Gartner’s 2025 IAM Leaders’ Guide to Identity Governance and Administration describes IGA as “intricate” and “challenging,” while noting that it is often the most expensive component of an IAM program. The research also points IAM leaders toward emerging capabilities including orchestration and broader machine identity coverage. 

Way Security is effectively targeting this implementation problem from a different angle. Instead of asking organizations to buy another platform to solve every edge case, the company is positioning its technology as an integration and enforcement layer that can make an existing IAM investment more complete.

From Coverage to Control

Way Security’s broader proposition is to turn IAM coverage into something closer to a measurable infrastructure capability. The company says its technology can help organizations bring applications under governance, automate provisioning and schema analysis, and extend lifecycle management, access reviews, and joiner-mover-leaver processes to systems that traditional IAM programs often struggle to incorporate. That could be particularly relevant for organizations with large portfolios of applications accumulated through acquisitions, internal development and departmental technology decisions, where older or less conventional systems often remain outside the IAM stack.

The same philosophy applies to identity providers. Rather than limiting SSO or MFA to applications that already support modern authentication protocols, Way Security aims to help organizations enforce existing IdP functionality across applications that were never designed for today’s identity standards. For security teams, that could mean reducing the number of systems that exist as exceptions to enterprise authentication policies while extending the value of IAM investments already in place. 

The final piece is visibility. An IAM program that cannot see every application or identity can struggle to identify orphaned accounts, excessive privileges, and shadow IT. Way Security’s model is built around exposing those gaps and enabling remediation, connecting governance and enforcement rather than treating them as separate exercises. Verizon’s 2025 research found that third-party involvement in breaches had doubled to 30%, while exploitation of vulnerabilities accounted for 20% of breaches and increased 34% year over year. Although those findings extend beyond identity alone, they underscore a broader reality for security leaders: modern attack surfaces are increasingly distributed, and controls that work only across the cleanest parts of an environment leave blind spots elsewhere.

A Different Bet on the Future of IAM

The identity security market will continue to attract new platforms promising better authentication, governance and access intelligence. Way Security is pursuing a different position. Its argument is that the next major advance in IAM may not come from replacing the stack organizations already spent years building, but from finally making that stack work across the parts of the enterprise it was never able to reach.

For Way Security, that means turning IAM from a collection of tools with varying levels of coverage into a control layer that can extend across the entire environment. In a market where identity vendors increasingly compete on features, Way Security is competing on reach, and as enterprises accumulate more applications, more identities and more exceptions, the ability to enforce security everywhere could become one of the industry’s most valuable differentiators.