Huntress Bets on Managed Security to Plug Pervasive Identity Gaps

COLUMBIA, MD – June 30, 2026 – In the world of cybersecurity, the front line is no longer a physical network firewall; it’s the digital identity of every user. Today, cybersecurity firm Huntress made a significant move on this new battlefield, announcing the general availability of its Managed Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM). The launch isn't just another product—it's a data-backed response to a problem the company says it has seen firsthand: a staggering number of security incidents stem from preventable identity-related weaknesses.

According to Huntress, a jaw-dropping 79% of all critical and high-severity incidents its teams responded to last year were identity-based. This new service, built on technology from its acquisition of Inside Agent less than a year ago, aims to shift the security paradigm from reactive firefighting to proactive fortification. By offering a “fully managed” solution for Microsoft 365, Huntress is making a calculated bet that for many businesses, the problem isn’t a lack of tools, but a lack of time, expertise, and resources to use them effectively.

The Widening Cracks in Digital Identity

For years, the mantra in IT has been about building walls. But in an era of cloud computing and remote work, the perimeter has dissolved. Now, security experts agree that identity is the new control plane, and attackers have taken note. The market for solutions that protect these identities is exploding, with some analysts projecting it to more than double in the next five years.

Identity Security Posture Management, or ISPM, is the practice of continuously finding and fixing the small cracks in this new perimeter—misconfigurations, excessive user permissions, and policies that have drifted from best practices. These are the mundane but dangerous gaps that attackers exploit.

The data Huntress collected during its Early Access program, which included over 12,000 Microsoft 365 tenants, paints a stark picture of how common these gaps are. The company found that over 60% of organizations were missing at least half of the recommended security controls. More specifically, two-thirds lacked proper multi-factor authentication (MFA) configurations, 59% had not adequately restricted powerful administrator accounts, and 55% had standard users who could perform administrative functions—a recipe for privilege escalation attacks.

“Security gaps caused by misconfigurations, over-permissioned users, and policy drift are more common than many teams realize, and closing them consistently takes the right combination of time, expertise, and tooling,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer at Huntress. “Managed ISPM was built to solve that challenge.”

From Firefighting to Fortification

While industry giants like Microsoft, Okta, and CrowdStrike offer powerful ISPM tools, they often function as sophisticated dashboards that still require an expert hand to interpret and act upon. Huntress is betting that a managed service—where its own experts define, deploy, and maintain security policies—is the missing piece for its target market of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and the Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that support them.

The service, which now extends beyond Microsoft’s Entra ID to include Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams, comes with two key features designed to overcome common hurdles. The first is “Learning Mode,” a feature that directly addresses the fear of disruption. It allows administrators to see exactly who would be impacted by a new security policy before it’s enforced, giving them confidence to move forward without inadvertently locking out employees or breaking critical workflows.

The second is “Managed Deployments.” Instead of providing a static checklist of recommendations, Huntress’s security team actively rolls out and maintains policies that are continuously updated based on real-world attacker behavior and industry standards. This creates a dynamic defense, a stark contrast to the set-and-forget baseline configurations that quickly become outdated.

This rapid move into managed identity services was fueled by the strategic acquisition of Inside Agent in late 2025. By integrating what it called a “mature, battle-tested engine,” Huntress was able to bring its Managed ISPM to market in under a year, a testament to the value of acquiring specialized expertise rather than building from the ground up.

The Bottom Line for Small Businesses

For the countless SMBs running on lean IT teams, the complexity of securing a modern cloud environment can be overwhelming. The testimonials from early access customers suggest Huntress's new offering strikes a chord with this exact audience.

Tarah Martin, an IT Support Admin at Meade, described how the service provided crucial visibility for her two-person team supporting a company that grew from 40 to 150 people in a year. “Huntress Managed ISPM helped us see and address that we had more admin accounts than we thought, and understand the risk that created for our business,” she said. “For a lean team like ours, that kind of visibility and follow-through helps us stay focused on the work that keeps the business growing.”

This sentiment is echoed by MSPs, who face the challenge of scaling security across dozens or hundreds of clients. “One of the biggest challenges with identity security is balancing stronger controls with the day-to-day reality of how clients operate,” said Steven Clark, Co-Founder of Foresight IT. He highlighted the ability to see potential impact before enforcement as a key feature that makes hardening security across multiple environments much easier to scale.

The return on investment for such a service is calculated not just in dollars, but in risk avoidance. By outsourcing the complex work of identity security, organizations can avoid the high cost of hiring specialized staff while simultaneously reducing their exposure to potentially devastating breaches, from business email compromise to ransomware.

A Critical Look at the Numbers

Behind the product launch are bold claims about effectiveness. Based on six months of data from its own incident response service, Huntress projects that the full deployment of these posture improvements could have prevented 35% of identity-based incidents. More ambitiously, it projects that figure will rise to 80% by the end of the third quarter as more controls are added to the platform.

These numbers aren't pulled from thin air; they are rooted in the concept of a continuous feedback loop. The company's Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) service acts as the alarm system, catching active threats. The new Managed ISPM service then acts as the engineer, using insights from those alarms to reinforce the structure and prevent similar break-ins in the future. The reliability of this reinforcement is underscored by another key data point: during Early Access, tens of thousands of policies were deployed with a rollback rate of less than 0.04%, suggesting the changes are both effective and stable.

This launch arrives as the entire industry pivots toward a Zero Trust philosophy—a model that assumes no user or device is inherently trustworthy. By providing a managed service that continuously verifies and hardens the identities at the heart of this model, Huntress is not only launching a new product but aligning itself with the fundamental direction of modern cybersecurity.