August 7, 2026
Why cybersecurity’s biggest challenge isn’t always the technology. It’s explaining it.
A few decades ago, cybersecurity was a much smaller discipline: email security, firewalls, antivirus. Fast forward to today, and the threat landscape has morphed into a complex, ever-changing attack surface that most tools and teams are struggling to map, let alone keep up with. Attackers are more brazen, the threats are more specific, and new technologies (like AI) haven’t leveled the playing field – they’ve handed attackers a serious advantage.
For cybersecurity vendors, managing multiple threats and technologies, and getting a handle on using AI safely and responsibly requires a diverse range of expertise and solutions.
Take something like machine identity, one of the fastest-growing fronts in that fight, for example. The catch-all phrase includes the credentials, certificates, keys, tokens, and other digital ‘identities’ that non-human things like servers, containers, service accounts, APIs, bots, and now AI agents use to authenticate and talk to each other, as opposed to identities tied to a human logging in. And it’s a growing challenge for companies.
To set the scene, 90% of organizations had an identity related breach last year and 83% had more than one – according to the 2026 Identity Security Landscape report ↗ by Palo Alto Networks. The same report also shows that machine identities outnumber human identities by 109:1.
That combination – scale and risk – makes machine identity a hard problem to secure. It’s also, as we’ll get into, a hard problem to sell.
Security can’t protect what it can’t see
Machine identities are not tangible, they multiply constantly, and most organizations don’t have a clean inventory of what exists, what it can access or who owns it. For example, a service account spun up for a temporary project two years ago can sit on a company’s infrastructure, fully credentialed and forgotten. This is what the industry is calling ‘shadow identities’, likening them to the shadow IT problem of a decade ago. Except now, it’s machines creating the sprawl instead of employees.
AI agents are beginning to make this worse. Once deployed, they can make decisions, interact with external services and access sensitive data with minimal human intervention. Many operate outside governance frameworks that were designed for human users, creating a security surface that’s both larger and harder to see than anything security teams have had to manage before.
Why buyers struggle see the risk
If the security challenge is about visibility, the sales challenge is about translation. And that’s where the complexity really starts.
The product is invisible by nature. The thing being protected isn’t a device or even a person; it’s a relationship between two systems no one in the buying committee has ever seen. And that buying committee doesn’t agree on what they’re buying: a CISO hears risk reduction, a platform engineering lead hears operational overhead, a CFO hears a cost with no obvious return – all in the same meeting, evaluating different products.
There’s also no single moment of urgency to force a decision. Unlike a phishing incident or a data breach, machine identity risk builds in the background, so the case has to be made rather than triggered, which leans harder on presales and technical validation than most sales motions, and demands messaging that simplifies without becoming inaccurate.
That last part is the real tightrope, and it’s where GTM teams either earn their place or lose the room.
In our recent Q&A series with cybersecurity leaders, Ping Identity’s VP of Field, Digital and Channel Marketing, Claire Pitman-Massie, made a related point when reflecting on what makes cybersecurity vendors stand out: businesses can get so wrapped up in their own product story that they stop focusing on what actually matters to the customer. That instinct – leading with the technology instead of the buyer’s problem – is exactly what sinks machine identity messaging when it drifts too far into jargon.
And TrustLayer (formerly Censornet) CEO, Ed MacNair, was blunter still: the most common mistake he sees in cybersecurity sales is reps pushing their own agenda instead of understanding what the customer needs, and failing to grasp how the problem actually affects that customer’s organization. For a category as abstract as machine identity, that failure to translate isn’t a minor miss – it’s usually the difference between a deal that moves and one that stalls indefinitely.
Where great GTM teams make the difference
None of this is solved by better technology alone. It’s solved by GTM teams who can do three things at once: translate abstract risk into tangible business impact, align deep technical accuracy with commercial messaging that actually lands, and bridge the gap between what the product does and what the buyer understands.
The challenge with machine identity was never really about building the product. It’s about making the problem feel real to people who will never see it, never touch it, and – until something goes wrong – may never fully believe it’s urgent.
This is only the beginning
Machine identity isn’t unique. It’s simply one of the clearest current examples of a category that’s both hard to secure and hard to explain – and as AI reshapes the threat landscape, more categories will start to look like it.
That’s exactly why strong GTM teams matter so much in cybersecurity right now. Selling a category like this takes more than a punchier tagline – it takes people who can hold the technical reality and the commercial story in the same hand without dropping either one. The best technical marketers can go too deep and lose the room; the best commercial storytellers can go too smooth and lose the CISO. The GTM teams who get it right are the ones built – deliberately – for both.
That’s a harder hire than it sounds – and it’s exactly the kind of GTM talent gap we spend our time helping cybersecurity companies close. If you’re building your team, our Pay-as-you-Grow model is ideal for startups and growth-stage organizations. Alternatively, if you’re a GTM professional adept at managing the technical and commercial aspects of cybersecurity, get in touch with us today.