CYBERSECURITY FIRM CyberArk is planning to expand its footprint in the Philippines as it looks to set up an office here within the next two years.
“One of the areas that we really want to look at expanding is in the financial services sector. I do foresee that in the next one to two years, we will have a local presence here,” CyberArk Regional Business Leader for the rest of Association of Southeast Asian Nations Serene Lee told BusinessWorld on June 4.
“Talking to our customers and industry experts, realizing that the government itself has been pushing a lot of new standards and reforms — that is going to drive the growth and focus on cybersecurity. I think that’s something that we have in mind,” she said.
CyberArk has 40 to 50 clients in the Philippines, primarily in the telecommunications and financial technology (fintech) sectors. Ms. Lee said they also have partnerships in the banking, healthcare, and hospitality sectors.
The company has headquarters in the United States and Israel and has offices in several countries globally. Its Asia-Pacific office is in Singapore.
Ms. Lee said cybersecurity is a growing concern for companies as the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has expanded the attack surface amid the surge in machine identities, or digital credentials used to authenticate machines, applications, and cloud workloads.
“AI agents can create new actions, tasks, or code, which in turn generate new machine identities,” she said.
These identities, if compromised, can be exploited for unauthorized access, data breaches, and lateral movement within networks, Ms. Lee said.
In its recent Identity Security Landscape report, CyberArk found that machine identities now outnumber human identities by more than 80 to 1.
With this, Ms. Lee said Philippine firms should adopt identity-first security practices.
“The second thing is we advise companies to put in place audit mechanisms to ensure that they are able to track and test and see who has access to the systems and who are creating identities within organizations,” she said.
Automation can also help companies bolster their security policies, Ms. Lee said.
“As machine identities scale into the millions or billions, manual tracking is no longer feasible.”
According to the 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index report, only 6% of organizations in the Philippines have “mature” cybersecurity systems that can handle threats. — Aubrey Rose A. Inosante
