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Okta & Deloitte join forces on AI identity controls. Thu, 3rd Sep 2026 (Today) Okta has formed a strategic alliance with Deloitte aimed at organisations in highly regulated and complex sectors in Australia. The partnership will initially focus on financial services, government, healthcare and other industries undergoing large-scale digital transformation. It centres on identity management as businesses face rising demands for governance, visibility, control and oversight. Both companies are targeting a market in which organisations are adopting AI, automation and cloud systems while also dealing with tighter regulatory requirements. In Australia, rules such as APRA CPS 230 are increasing pressure on organisations to review how they manage access and accountability across their systems. That pressure extends beyond staff and customers. As AI agents, software applications and automated systems gain access to internal resources, companies must manage a broader mix of human and non-human identities, including what they can access and who is responsible for them. The alliance combines Deloitte's cyber, identity and business transformation capabilities with Okta's Workforce Identity and Customer Identity products. The aim is to help organisations embed identity controls into broader security, transformation and AI programs, while improving access management across more complex technology environments. Legacy identity systems remain a central issue for many large organisations. Businesses have invested heavily in modern digital infrastructure, but many identity frameworks were built for older environments and can struggle when applications, devices, automated systems and AI tools all interact with the same enterprise systems. Okta said this shift is changing the role of identity inside organisations. What was once seen largely as a tool for managing employee logins is now treated as part of cyber security, compliance and AI governance. "Organisations are no longer managing access solely for employees and customers. They are increasingly managing access for AI agents and other non-human identities as well," said Mike Reddie, Vice President and General Manager, ANZ, Okta. "Identity has become a critical foundation for digital transformation, cyber resilience and AI adoption. As organisations introduce more AI agents and non-human identities into their environments, maintaining visibility, accountability and control is becoming increasingly important. Together with Deloitte, we are helping organisations build the capabilities needed to strengthen security, support regulatory obligations and adopt AI with confidence." Deloitte linked the partnership to a broader wave of technology change across Australian organisations, with many businesses trying to modernise legacy environments while preparing for more extensive AI use. "Organisations across Australia are modernising legacy environments at the same time as they prepare for a new wave of AI-driven transformation. Identity is becoming increasingly important to both, particularly as the number of people, applications, devices and AI agents interacting with enterprise systems continues to grow. "Identity now sits at the intersection of cyber security, regulatory compliance, customer experience and AI governance. Working with Okta enables us to help organisations address identity as part of broader business and technology transformation, while putting the governance and controls in place to support the next phase of digital and AI adoption," said Shweta Pandey, Partner, Cyber, Technology & Transformation, Deloitte. AI controls The alliance also builds on Okta's recent push into tools for managing AI agents and other non-human identities. Earlier this year, the company made Okta for AI Agents generally available, saying it allows organisations to discover, onboard, manage and govern AI agents across the enterprise. In August, Okta also launched Agent SSO, designed to extend identity controls to agent-to-application connections. It said this would help organisations manage what AI agents can access and what actions they can take under existing identity policies. Okta is also expanding Cross App Access, an open protocol intended to give organisations more visibility and control over agent-to-app and app-to-app connections. More than 25 technology companies have announced support or early adoption, including Anthropic, Atlassian, Canva, Cloudflare and Zoom. Those product moves point to a broader shift in how companies are approaching AI inside the enterprise. Rather than treating AI systems simply as software features, organisations are increasingly being pushed to manage them as identities with defined ownership, access rights and governance requirements throughout their lifecycle. For Deloitte, the partnership provides another route into large transformation projects where identity, compliance and cyber security are becoming more closely tied to AI deployment. For Okta, it broadens access to sectors where regulatory scrutiny and operational complexity make identity management a board-level concern. The work will focus on helping organisations establish clearer governance and stronger oversight as automated systems take on a larger role in business operations and decision-making.

Huskeys lands $27M Series A as Blackstone Innovations Investments backs a new Edge Security category. FinanceWire Sep. 2, 2026, 08:35 AM Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2nd, 2026, FinanceWire The Wall Street Journal first reported that Huskeys has closed a $27 million Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments, capital that lifts the company's total funding to $35 million and puts real weight behind a category that did not have a name until recently. Huskeys is building what it calls Network Edge Security Management, or NESM, a unified intelligence and control layer that sits across the modern network edge. The New York City company follows an $8 million seed round with this raise, and the investor list reads like a map of the people who built the previous generation of edge security products. The syndicate says something about the thesis. Blackstone Innovations Investments led. Merlin Ventures joined. So did Skinos Ventures, the firm founded by Shlomo Kramer and Yishay Yovel, who pioneered the WAF and SASE categories. Zscaler Ventures and Okta Ventures both participated, as did Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel. The angel list matters just as much. Eran Reshef, who invented both the WAF and the CAPTCHA, put money in. So did executives from Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Intel. When the people who built WAFs, CDNs, and hyperscale cloud infrastructure all write checks into a company proposing a management layer above their creations, the signal is difficult to ignore. Strategic investors from Zscaler and Okta suggest that incumbents see Huskeys as complementary rather than competitive. That is consistent with how the platform is designed. It orchestrates existing infrastructure instead of displacing it. The customer base arrived before the Series A. Huskeys already counts TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone, and Hugging Face among its customers. That mix spans social media at planetary scale, physical entertainment venues, digital health, financial services, and open source AI infrastructure. Very few of those companies share an architecture, which is arguably the point. The volume numbers give a sense of the surface area involved. Huskeys analyzes more than a trillion web requests and thousands of network configurations every day across organizations worldwide. A trillion requests daily is the kind of throughput that makes a data model either a genuine asset or an expensive liability, and the company has staked its architecture on the former. Why the edge needs a management layer. Modern organizations secure applications across an expanding mix of cloud providers, Content Delivery Networks, Web Application Firewalls, and other edge services. Each of those tools has its own policy language, its own telemetry format, and its own operational assumptions. Stack five or six of them together across multiple clouds and the result is an environment where the security team owns the outcome but no single console owns the picture. AI is now changing the traffic flowing through that environment from both directions. Autonomous agents are becoming legitimate users of applications, arriving with access patterns that look nothing like a browser session. On the other side, attackers are using AI to discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than before. Developments such as Mythos demonstrate how AI-driven capabilities are accelerating the speed and scale of cyber threats. The trajectory is clear. Non-human traffic is expected to account for 70 percent of all web traffic by 2027. Security architectures built on the assumption that a human sits behind each request are now managing a minority of what they see. The investor case, in the investor's words. Blackstone's chief information security officer framed the thesis directly. "The way organizations secure internet-facing applications is fundamentally changing. AI-driven traffic and increasingly fragmented edge environments require a new approach to security management," said Adam Fletcher, Chief Information Security Officer at Blackstone. "Huskeys has built a platform designed to operate at enterprise scale while advancing a new category for the modern network edge. We believe the company is well positioned to redefine how organizations manage edge security, and we're excited to support Huskeys as they continue to develop their product in this important category." Fletcher's position gives that endorsement an unusual quality. Blackstone is both an investor in the round and a customer of the platform, which means the security leader vouching for the technology also operates it. Under the hood: the Unified Data Model. The technical foundation is a patented Unified Data Model. The UDM creates a common layer of understanding across different environments, technologies, and providers, which allows security insights, policies, and actions to move seamlessly across platforms. In practice, that means a policy intent expressed once can be translated into the specific dialect of whichever CDN, WAF, load balancer, VPC, or security group needs to enforce it. The platform connects and orchestrates the modern network edge ecosystem, including CDNs and WAFs, cloud-native security solutions, and network components such as load balancers, VPCs, and security groups. It supports multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments and helps organizations maintain consistent security from the Internet Edge all the way to the application. Sitting on top of that model are the capabilities customers actually operate: continuous posture assessment, dynamic policy generation, orchestration, and Virtual Patching. Virtual Patching allows security teams to mitigate vulnerabilities directly at the network edge within minutes, providing protection while a permanent fix is being developed, tested, and deployed in the application code. The platform also helps organizations identify, understand, and manage agentic traffic, enabling legitimate AI agents to interact with applications while reducing security risk, false positives, and disruption to the business. The founder's framing. Huskeys' chief executive described the origin of the company in terms of the tooling gap security teams inherited. "We founded Huskeys because security teams are being asked to protect increasingly complex edge environments with legacy tools that were never designed to work together or to address the challenges of the new AI era," said Itai Gafni, CEO and Co-Founder of Huskeys. "Every business today runs through its network edge - that's where your customers, your revenue, and your threats all meet, yet for most organizations, that edge works against them instead of for them. As AI transforms both legitimate traffic and cyberattacks, organizations need an intelligence layer that continuously understands what's happening across the edge and adapts security in real time. Our goal is to make the network finally work for the business, not against it. That's the category we're building." What the raise buys. Category creation is expensive and slow. It requires a product that works, customers willing to describe the problem in the vendor's language, and enough capital to stay in the market while analysts decide whether the acronym sticks. Huskeys now has $35 million in total funding, a customer roster that includes TikTok and Hugging Face, and a lead investor whose own security organization uses the product. The commercial question ahead is whether enterprises will fund a management layer as a distinct line item, separate from the CDN and WAF budgets it coordinates. The answer will depend on how visibly the platform reduces the operational load on teams that are already managing more edge surface than any single tool was designed to cover. On that measure, a trillion requests a day is a reasonable place to start proving it. Contact. TVC Analyst [email protected] Sponsored Financial Content

Israeli cybersecurity startup Huskeys has raised $27 million in a funding round led by US investment giant Blackstone, bringing total funding to $35 million. The company is developing an agentic AI layer for web application firewalls, technology it argues needs updating for an era of autonomous AI agents. Investors include Skinos Ventures, Shlomo Kramer's Yishay Yovel fund, and investment arms of Okta and Zscaler, alongside executives from Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and other tech firms. Okta and Zscaler have formed strategic partnerships with Huskeys. Founded by Unit 8200 alumni Itai Gafni and Roy Weissfeld, the company has secured customers including TikTok, Legoland, and Hugging Face since emerging from stealth five months ago.