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As a leader in identity security, CyberArk is redefining how organizations protect their critical assets, enabling proactive defense against cyber threats and securing privileged access across hybrid environments.
Celebrating 25 years since its inception and 10 years as a public company, CEO Matt Cohen reflects on CyberArk’s founding principle; protecting the most critical IT users when accessing the most critical IT infrastructures and systems against malevolent takeover.
Cohen’s exposure to both sales and customer success allowed him to deeply connect with customers to understand their pain points, whether from a cybersecurity or tooling solution standpoint. “We ultimately want to make sure that we’re solving real problems for customers, not just producing a product for product's sake,” he says.
The powerful forces reshaping cybersecurity today
New identities, new environments, new attack vectors—and the rise of GenAI are redefining what it means to secure privileged identities “The very nature of what is a privileged identity has changed, moving to the workforce, developers and even machines. Our vision is to secure every identity with the right level of privilege controls,” explains Cohen.
Aside from shifts in the nature, size and scope of identities, environments have changed too. “Before, organizations only had to protect their on premises data – if you could secure your ‘walled garden’, you were okay. Now in hybrid and cloud environments, there are multiple vicinities to secure,” he explains.
Social changes post-pandemic, such as working from home or indeed anywhere, have also made cybersecurity parameters more vulnerable. “From these complexities in identity and environment surface new attack methods. Attackers are innovating at a rate that’s exponentially quicker, with more breaches year on year. Organizations and enterprises need to rethink, because the old paradigms of cybersecurity no longer apply to this world,” he cautions.
Cohen notes how CyberArk’s role is to respond to these changing forces in the market. “Intelligent privilege controls can enable organizations to survive, and thrive, in this threat landscape.”
“Intelligent privilege controls can enable organizations to survive, and thrive, in this threat landscape.”
Matt Cohen, CEO, CyberArk
Keeping pace with the rapidly changing threat landscape
Given the increasingly complex nature of cybersecurity, Cohen believes that companies have to assume that a breach has already occurred. “Organizations need to go beyond detection and discovery to actually implement core controls – the focus needs to be on identities.
Businesses also need to understand what the attackers are doing. Cybersecurity is a unique industry because there are three people in the room: the organization, the customer, and the attacker. Everybody is innovating from all angles, and you need to keep pace with that,” explains Cohen.
CyberArk Labs helps to understand the latest and greatest threats emerging from the cybersecurity landscape. “We make sure we’re never being complacent with cognitive lock-in, where we’re only thinking about what we’ve done right. We want to understand where we need to go,” explains Cohen.
For instance, as quantum computers become more sophisticated, traditional encryption methods may become vulnerable – and it’s the job of enterprise security companies like CyberArk to develop, or invest in, new cryptographic technology. “We have to future proof our own technological evolution – get ahead of the curve, rather than play catch up,” says Cohen. “We need to make sure we innovate within, especially in a world that’s constantly innovating around us from an attack perspective,” he adds.
“We need to make sure we innovate within, especially in a world that’s constantly innovating around us from an attack perspective.”
Matt Cohen, CEO, CyberArk
Striking innovation to realize CyberArk’s ultimate vision
“Working closely with partners in the system integrator community, we examine what customers want and where we can actually provide real security value. It’s a little cliché, but cybersecurity is a team sport,” adds Cohen.
CyberArk’s acquisition of Venafi underlines the importance of protecting machine identities in particular, as organizations begin to deploy IoT applications, modern microservice-based code and the AI agent workforce.
“Venafi played an important role in securing machine identity. As a company, we identify the gaps and specific assets we can acquire to accelerate our vision. We take a similar view with our investment fund CyberArk Ventures, but maybe a little bit farther out.”
“Our vision is to secure the world against cyber threats so we can, together, move fearlessly forward.”
Matt Cohen, CEO, CyberArk
The consolidation of trust in the industry is the best hope of guarding against attackers. “Together with our customers and partners, we want to be able to remove that fear – but not without some productive paranoia. It’s about having the confidence to move forward while remaining vigilant,” concludes Cohen.
