Huntress Hits the Accelerator on Identity Security Posture Management
Acquiring Microsoft 365 security vendor Inside Agent was a step toward the imminent addition of a left-of-boom identity security product to the vendor's existing right-of-boom solution.
Avid Channelholic readers may recall how badly CEO Kyle Hanslovan wanted to tell me about the “big stuff” Huntress has brewing with Microsoft back in July, along with how frustratingly disciplined he was about not spilling the beans.
I know I’ve been more than a little curious about the matter since then anyway. So you can imagine how interested I was a couple of weeks ago to learn that Huntress has acquired Inside Agent, an identity security vendor for Microsoft 365 environments. Was this the next step in an unfolding master plan?
Yes, but not the one Hanslovan hinted at last summer.
“It’s all in line with our overall strategy of being the best-in-class security solution for the Microsoft ecosystem,” says Huntress chief product officer Prakash Ramamurthy (pictured).
It aligns as well with Huntress’s ongoing pivot toward identity security, which has origins extending back to the November 2023 launch of the company’s Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response solution and Hanslovan’s observation at the time that the increasing effectiveness of endpoint security solutions and the increasing importance of SaaS applications had made identities the hot new attack surface.
“The threat landscape where the endpoint was king still exists, but there’s new beachfront property,” he said.
Hackers continue to covet it too, according to the 2025 Huntress Managed ITDR Report, which said that identity-based attacks presently account for 40% of all security incidents and that 67% of organizations have seen an increase in identity-related incidents over the past three years. An even higher 68% of survey participants, furthermore, called themselves unable to detect these identity-based threats until after they’ve achieved persistence. No wonder Huntress’s managed ITDR service, per Ramamurthy, has been a hit.
“It’s one of our fastest-growing products,” he says. “We’re protecting north of about 8 million identities today.”
Of course, the thing about ITDR is that it’s a right-of-boom solution. Given the continued threat posed by identity-based attacks, Huntress reasoned, there ought to be something the company could do to mitigate vulnerabilities left of boom too by, for example, automatically enabling MFA at companies not using it.
“We thought we should be able to do more for our customers and help them manage their configurations upfront so that they can reduce the risk of some of these compromises happening,” Ramamurthy says.
Hence the company’s twin decisions to a) create an identity security posture management solution, and b) acquire Inside Agent to accelerate the development process. Which has apparently worked, because an early edition of the new offering is slated to arrive in a matter of weeks.
“We want to get this in the hands of early adopters by January of next year latest,” Ramamurthy says.
And that “big stuff” Huntress has coming with Microsoft? It appears likely to remain a mystery for longer than that.
Two last notes about that identity security posture management solution
1. When it enters general availability early next year, it will sell as a separate SKU priced on top of existing Huntress products, including ITDR.
2. If it sells well, Huntress is open to the thought of combining it with ITDR in a single SKU.
“We’ll learn from it next year and make sure we feel good about the product offering,” Ramamurthy says. “If we see more and more customers buying both of them together, that will be the leading indicator to say, ‘Hey, maybe we should offer it as a bundle.’”