The power of one: Why context is the currency of modern security

In cybersecurity, we’ve made a dangerous compromise.

We’ve allowed identity context, security context, and data context to live in silos, each optimized for its own corner of the enterprise, but collectively blind to the bigger picture. That fragmentation may have been tolerable five years ago, but today, it’s a liability.

What do we mean by “context”? Simply put, context is the surrounding information that gives meaning to a signal. Identity context tells you who is asking for access. Security context tells you what threats are present and how they’re behaving. Data context tells you what information is being touched, where it resides, and how sensitive it is.

The enterprise stack has become increasingly complex: sprawling cloud infrastructure, decentralized data, and a surge in human and non-human identities alike. Yet the systems tasked with governing access, detecting threats, and classifying risk remain deeply disconnected. Identity applications attempt to secure users. Security tools chase threats. Data platforms try to inventory the unknown. And somewhere in between, security teams are left trying to stitch together meaning from overwhelming telemetry. Individually, each of these perspectives is powerful. But in isolation, they’re incomplete.

We tell ourselves this is manageable. But it’s not.

The broken state of context

In theory, a SOC should bring it all together. But in practice? Integration is expensive, fragile, and rarely comprehensive. The sheer volume of data makes ingestion and correlation prohibitively costly. And even when the data is centralized, interpretation still depends on a human analyst with partial context, trying to understand whether an identity is behaving maliciously or just unusually.

Many platforms nibble at the edges of this problem. But even the strongest players operate within constrained domains. They see a slice of the picture, not the whole.

The result? Missed threats. Bloated attack surfaces. And a growing gap between potential and actual defense.

What if we reimagined the stack?

What if we could converge identity, security, and data context into one cohesive model: not just integrated, but intelligently interconnected?

A model where identity data isn’t just available to the SOC, but actively informs the full lifecycle of threat detection, control, and prevention. Where data access is classified and governed with full awareness of who is asking, why, and what they’re allowed to do. A model where AI agents—autonomous or semi-autonomous—are evaluated not in isolation, but in context: What is this agent? Who authorized it? What can it access? What’s the blast radius if it’s compromised?

This isn’t about giving the SOC team a longer manual. It’s about reducing noise and elevating signal. Purpose-built integrations between identity governance, data classification, and operational security allow us to answer questions like who this entity is, what it’s connected to, and what it would mean if it was compromised.

From a proactive standpoint, we can shrink the attack surface by mapping access pathways from an attacker’s perspective. From a reactive lens, we can assess blast radius quickly, with no more guessing.

Addressing vital use cases

This combined context has the power to solve some killer use cases, including:

• Properly securing and governing AI agents.
• Understanding the relationship between humans, AI agents, and the data they interact with.
• Building dynamic risk heat maps that reveal latent threats before they manifest.
• Enhancing enterprise security hygiene, before remediation becomes an emergency response.
• Enabling rapid investigations based not on logs, but on context-aware intelligence.

The future demands cohesion

Security tools can no longer operate independently of each other. Identity governance, threat defense, and data protection can’t live in separate ecosystems. That era is gone.

The organizations that thrive in the age of AI and digital acceleration will be the ones who unify their context, those who treat identity, data, and security not as parallel disciplines, but as an integrated fabric.

The power of one isn’t a feature, it’s a mindset, and it’s time we adopted it.