Securing the Agentic Enterprise: Where the Ecosystem Goes Next

AI agents are moving fast, and security has to move faster.

As agents start reading data, calling tools and taking action on behalf of human users, the attack surface grows in ways traditional controls weren't built for. Securing AI isn't a one-time project. It's a daily discipline: governing what agents can access, watching how they behave and making sure every action can be traced.

This year we're celebrating the growing ecosystem of innovators helping our shared customers build that discipline into their AI strategy and scale it safely across the agentic enterprise.

No single vendor can secure the agentic enterprise alone. Every organization runs its own identity systems, security operations tools, regulatory requirements and threat models. Customers shouldn't have to choose between a governed data platform and the specialized security tools they already trust.

That's why our ecosystem of security innovators matters. By building on and connecting to Snowflake, they help customers extend their existing security investments, govern AI responsibly and scale with confidence.

AI agents are moving from experimentation to production and multiplying fast. According to Gartner, an average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have over 150,000 agents in use, and only 13% of organizations think they have the right AI agent governance in place.

That gap matters because agents change our approach to security. A traditional application executes predefined code. Agents, however, make their own decisions, access data autonomously, take action across systems and move information — often without a human in the loop. Each connection becomes one more place for organizations to enforce policy, catch agent abuse and respond to threats.

Securing AI agents takes identity, data protection, access control, monitoring and response capabilities working together. Our ecosystem of security innovators brings those capabilities together, enabling customers to build on Snowflake's shared foundation while extending protection across the enterprise.

Snowflake provides the foundation for agentic security: governance capabilities through Snowflake Horizon Catalog, a distinct identity for every agent and policies to protect sensitive data. Our ecosystem of innovators extends this foundation by connecting to the security tools, systems and workflows customers already rely on. Here are some of the areas where they're making a difference.

Sensitive data doesn't live in one place; neither should your security. These solutions extend Snowflake classification and tags into enterprise-wide data security posture management, helping teams discover sensitive data, identify exposure and prioritize remediation wherever that data resides.

Protecting data at rest isn't enough when agents and models are actively processing it. Our ecosystem of innovators adds capabilities such as tokenization and dynamic de-identification to keep sensitive values protected during AI workflows, without losing sight of the business value that data can deliver.

Access should reflect how an organization works, not depend on rules hardcoded into individual applications. These solutions connect Snowflake permissions to real-world entitlements — such as cost centers, reporting lines and project teams — so access can adapt as people, roles and agents change. With access control incorporated at multiple layers, teams can reap the benefits of more precise access, less manual administration and enhanced guardrails for AI adoption.

Agents need more than an identity. They need accountability from creation to retirement. Our ecosystem of innovators brings Snowflake agent identities into enterprise identity programs, helping organizations manage provisioning, access reviews and decommissioning across the systems agents touch. That means fewer unmanaged identities, clearer accountability and governance that scales with the agent population.

Even well-governed agents can behave in unexpected ways. Policies set the boundaries, but behavioral analytics and red-teaming help reveal how those boundaries might be tested — or bypassed.

Our ecosystem of innovators leverages the power of the Snowflake platform by building solutions to help enterprises identify emerging abuse patterns, from attempts to escape a sandbox to unexpected agent behavior. They feed those findings back into Snowflake controls. The goal: learn faster, strengthen defenses and stay ahead of evolving threats.

Security operations centers need to detect and respond to threats across users, agents and infrastructure. But fragmented telemetry, short retention windows and rising data costs can slow teams down.

These innovators help modernize security operations by running detection and response on security telemetry stored in Snowflake. Analysts gain a more connected view of activity, longer data retention and opportunities to build agentic security workflows — without letting data costs spiral.

Resilience is about responding when things don’t go right: how quickly you can spot a problem, contain it and get back to business. With agents acting at machine speed, the reaction window shrinks fast. Solutions in this category help organizations plan for recovery, test that plan often and trace an action back to the human or agent behind it.

The shift to agentic AI is changing how organizations think about identity, access, data protection and security operations. As agents move from pilots into everyday business processes, the ecosystem must evolve with them. We'll continue expanding partner capabilities across these seven security pillars, connecting Snowflake's governed data foundation with the specialized tools customers trust.

The path to enterprise AI isn't about choosing between innovation and security — it's about building the ecosystem that makes both possible. Snowflake’s commitment to expanding that ecosystem and helping customers make AI security frictionless was on display during Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October as we offered practical guidance that teams could put to work right away and into the future:

• Now is a good time to step back and rethink what security should look like when agents are doing real work across the business. The Dark Reading article "Redefining Security for the Agentic Enterprise" makes the case that AI agents need a new security playbook.
• Our blogs covered topics including detecting agent abuse, discovering how inherited grants reduce grant sprawl, building the modern AI infrastructure stack and building disaster recovery for the scale of AI.
• The October Snowflake AI Pulse session featured a briefing on our latest security and governance innovations and showed how these capabilities help teams protect their data and govern AI agents at scale. Watch the current AI Pulse on demand and register for future sessions.
• At our user group community event in Bellevue, Washington, Snowflake practitioners, decision-makers and architects met to trade real-world lessons on securing and governing modern data and AI workloads, including networking and connecting with product team members.

Learn how to secure your platform from the ground up, and catch up on these security-focused Expedition virtual sessions on demand:

• State of Platform: Enterprise AI Readiness and Secure
• Govern Data & Agents Across Every Surface
• State of Enterprise AI: Scaling the Next Frontier of Agents