Privileged Access Management (PAM)

CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks are racing to answer the question Jensen Huang raised on Sept. 10, when he told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference that cybersecurity is likely to become AI's next major growth market. CrowdStrike unveiled SafeMind at its Fal.Con conference on Sept. 1, an agentic cybersecurity system built by its own Cyber Superintelligence Lab on top of open Nemotron models, which the company says detects threats 29% more accurately and remediates them six times faster than the frontier models it benchmarked against. CrowdStrike's fiscal second quarter revenue rose 26% to $1.47 billion, with net new annual recurring revenue climbing 51% to a record $333 million, and CEO George Kurtz disclosed an eight-figure Falcon Flex deal with a frontier AI lab. Palo Alto Networks took the opposite path, integrating CyberArk and Chronosphere and adding Console, an AI native platform for agentic enterprise workflows; its Next Generation Security annual recurring revenue reached $9.1 billion, up 63% year over year, and total remaining performance obligations crossed $20 billion for the first time, rising 34% to $21.2 billion, even as it swung to a GAAP net loss of $282 million in the quarter. Investors rewarded only CrowdStrike's report, sending its shares up roughly 20% on Aug. 27, while Palo Alto's shares fell more than 5% despite revenue rising 34% to $3.41 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter. The threat behind both bets is not hypothetical: Anthropic told Reuters it disrupted a Russia-linked hacking campaign that used its Claude models against more than 20 Ukrainian government and defense targets, and a joint study by Wiz and Irregular found AI agents completed sophisticated offensive security challenges for under $50 in computing costs versus close to $100,000 for the same work by paid human researchers.

Palo Alto Networks reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $3.41 billion, up 34% year over year, alongside a $282 million GAAP net loss after earning $254 million a year earlier. Next-Generation Security annual recurring revenue rose 63% to $9.10 billion, though the company said the increase is not an organic growth rate because the current portfolio includes acquired identity and observability businesses absent from the prior-year base, and remaining performance obligations climbed 34% to $21.2 billion. GAAP operating income fell to $172 million from $497 million, cutting GAAP operating margin to 5.0% from 19.6%, while company-defined non-GAAP operating income reached $1.01 billion and non-GAAP net income was $853 million. The quarter's operating reconciliation included $487 million of share-based compensation-related charges, $281 million of acquired-intangible amortization and $68 million of acquisition-related costs, and the net-income gap also reflected a $524 million fair-value change in convertible senior notes acquired in the CyberArk transaction. Operating cash flow rose to $1.36 billion from $1.02 billion, and management guided fiscal 2027 revenue of $14.10 billion to $14.20 billion, growth of 23% to 24%, with NGS ARR expected to reach $11.075 billion to $11.175 billion, up 22% to 23%.

Jim Cramer expressed bullishness on Palo Alto Networks after the company delivered strong fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 results, though the stock fell 9.3% on September 2 despite the beat. Palo Alto reported revenue of $3.41 billion, up 34% year over year and above the $3.35 billion estimate, with adjusted earnings of $1.02 per share versus $0.98 expected. Next-Generation Security ARR rose 63% to $9.10 billion, but management's fiscal 2027 guidance implies a slowdown to 22-23% growth for NGS ARR, which is a key concern. The company also faces execution risk from integrating acquisitions like CyberArk and Chronosphere. Hedge fund holdings edged up to 89 funds in the second quarter from 87, and short interest was about 2.8% of float.

Palo Alto Networks reports earnings on September 1, with Wall Street expecting strong results after a flurry of price-target hikes from analysts including Benchmark, J.P. Morgan, Robert W. Baird, and Jefferies, all maintaining Buy ratings. The company guided to revenue of about $3.35 billion for the July quarter, up roughly 32% year over year, with its next-generation security business expected to grow close to 60%. This will be the first full quarter including CyberArk, the $25 billion identity security acquisition, and its new AI security product Prisma AIRS has been the fastest-growing product in company history. However, a large portion of that growth is bought rather than earned, so investors should focus on organic growth and whether AI security is converting into recurring revenue. With shares more than doubled this year, a simple beat may not suffice; strong fiscal 2027 guidance is crucial to avoid a selloff. The stock trades at a forward P/E of 241x and a price-to-sales ratio of 24.21x, 109% above its five-year average, while analysts expect EPS growth of 9% to 22% through the decade. The company has $3.11 billion in cash against $2.13 billion in debt, and its balance sheet is clean. In its last reported quarter, revenue rose 31% to $3 billion, with EPS of $0.85 beating consensus, and it raised fiscal 2026 guidance to revenue between $11.415 billion and $11.425 billion. Analysts have a consensus Strong Buy with a mean target of $367.28 and a high target of $475, implying 29% upside.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora held acquisition talks with both Okta and Datadog before landing a $25 billion deal for CyberArk, and is now circling Cribl and ClickHouse as his next targets, The Information reported on Wednesday. Between late 2024 and early 2025, Arora met with Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, and discussions progressed to product complementarity but stalled over price disagreements. Okta, valued at roughly $13.5 billion at the start of last year, has since climbed around 30% to a market cap near $23 billion. In spring 2025, Arora approached Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel with a hypothetical acquisition when Datadog was valued at more than $40 billion, but Pomel was not receptive and no formal offer was made; Datadog's market cap has since roughly doubled to more than $80 billion. With both paths closed, Arora executed fallback moves: Palo Alto agreed in July 2025 to acquire CyberArk, and in January 2026 paid $3.35 billion for Chronosphere, a smaller Datadog rival. Together, those two acquisitions contributed $338 million of the $3 billion in revenue Palo Alto generated in the April quarter. Arora's accelerating dealmaking reflects a conviction that AI is fundamentally changing the threat landscape, with AI agents capable of executing cyberattacks humans never could, making continuous monitoring a boardroom priority.

Securden has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2026 Gartner research report Reduce Cybersecurity Attacks With Least Privilege Endpoint Strategies. The report, authored by Paul Mezzera and Michael Kelley, highlights the cybersecurity risks of persistent local administrator privileges on endpoints and the growing challenges of Shadow AI, noting that 60% of organizations report unsanctioned AI agent automation. Gartner recommends integrating privilege elevation and delegation management into cybersecurity strategies to remove end-user local admin access and control application execution. Securden delivers its PEDM capabilities as a core module of its Unified PAM platform and through a standalone Endpoint Privilege Manager, helping organizations eliminate standing local administrator rights while enabling secure task execution.

CrowdStrike has been named the 2026 Global Company of the Year in Identity Threat Detection and Response by Frost & Sullivan. The recognition highlights CrowdStrike's Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security platform, which surpassed $520 million in ending annual recurring revenue and grew more than 34% year-over-year. Frost & Sullivan cited the platform's ability to eliminate standing privileges and enforce real-time, risk-based access for human, non-human, and AI agent identities. The firm also noted CrowdStrike's unified, cloud-native approach that treats identity as a first-class security signal alongside endpoints, cloud, and data.