One team, every identity: A PwC Leader on Breaking Down Identity Security Silos

In this episode of Identity Decoded, recorded at Identiverse, hosts Roy Akerman and Rob Ainscough flip the usual format with Simon Moffat, founder of analyst firm The Cyber Hut and a 20-plus year veteran of identity vendors including ForgeRock and Oracle. Simon argues that identity's traditional pillars — IGA, PAM, access management — were built for a linear, on-premises world, and they're now colliding under pressure from AI, non-human identity, and agentic systems. The conversation covers why category definitions provide clarity but should never be considered unshakeable, Simon's vision for a composable "identity operating system" built around horizontal capabilities instead of vertical products, and a practical framework for actually measuring whether identity controls are working.

In this episode of Identity Decoded, recorded live at Identiverse, hosts Roy Akerman and Rob Ainscough sit down with George Roberts, Principal Architect for Identity and Access at McDonald's, to talk about Identity Security at a scale few practitioners ever encounter. George manages 2.2 million workforce identities across 95 markets worldwide. The conversation covers how McDonald's built a single source of truth without 1,500 separate HR integrations, why frontline workers get a printed, paper-based MFA sheet as their "least common denominator" security factor, and George's long-term vision for verifiable credentials and distributed identity. They also dig into why identity teams get looped into new technology initiatives too late, and why George doesn't think AI or continuous identity are overhyped, just under-answered.

In episode two of this two-part series of Identity Decoded, hosts Roy Akerman and Rob Ainscough continue their conversation with Aaron Turner — this time tracing a surprising parallel between drug cartels and ransomware groups. Aaron was assigned to the US Department of Justice after 9/11 and spent 18 months working with DEA Special Operations Division under Steve Murphy and Javier Peña — the real-life figures behind Netflix's Narcos. He breaks down why both types of criminal organizations are, at their core, transnational, economically rational actors that rely on stolen or assumed identities to operate. The conversation moves from Pablo Escobar's "plata o plomo" model of corrupting trust, to franchise-style scaling that lets sophisticated attackers hide inside the noise of less-skilled affiliates, to Aaron's later work at Idaho National Lab building some of the first cyber-physical attack simulators — and what that taught him about identity segmentation across IT and OT environments.

In episode one of this two-part series of Identity Decoded, hosts Roy Akerman and Rob Ainscough sit down with Aaron Turner, who spent eight years at Microsoft during the founding of Active Directory — starting as a support engineer and later working on Active Directory, SQL Server, Windows Mobile, and Xbox Live. Aaron takes listeners back to the mid-'90s mindset that shaped Active Directory's design: a mission to "kill Novell" and sell more Windows and Office licenses, not to build a security boundary. The conversation traces how that original trade-off — deployment speed over security — led to decades of "identity debt," why LSASS (designed in 1998) has become a favorite target in modern ransomware-as-a-service kill chains, and what the NSA's declassified account of removing Russian actors from the US Treasury reveals about identity segmentation done right (and wrong).

In this episode of Identity Decoded, recorded live from Identiverse, hosts Roy and Rob sit down with Sean O'Dell to unpack one of the most talked-about — and least understood — challenges in Identity Security today: agentic identity. Sean shares how his background across healthcare, entertainment (including a stint reverse-engineering an authorization system at The Walt Disney Company), and engineering shaped his product-first approach to identity and access management. The conversation dives into why identity must be a "first directive" baked into agents at creation, the difference between agent identifiers and agent identities, the lack of standards across providers, and Sean's practical advice for security teams overwhelmed by agentic adoption: pick one team, one use case, and deliver one verified agentic identity before trying to scale. They also cover AI security hype, the legal and liability questions raised by LLM decision-making, and why "IGA is the answer to all your questions" might be identity's biggest myth.