As enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys, a critical security gap has emerged that traditional controls like SSO and MFA simply can’t address: the growing chaos of unmanaged identities, orphaned accounts, and sprawling privileges across hybrid environments.
Rita Gurevich, Founder and CEO of SPHERE, has been witnessing this evolution firsthand since founding her company in 2010, originally as a consulting firm born from the lessons learned during the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. What started as a “clean-up company” helping organizations untangle their technology assets has evolved into a mission to establish “Identity Hygiene” as a foundational security layer.
In this exclusive VMblog Q&A, Gurevich explains why the explosive growth of non-human identities—now outnumbering human identities 82 to 1—represents one of the biggest blind spots for modern security teams and boards.
She reveals how SPHERE’s approach to “upstream hygiene” is helping enterprises safely navigate Active Directory modernization, maximize their PAM investments, and transform compliance from effort-based point-in-time assessments to evidence-driven continuous monitoring. With fresh Series B funding from Edison Partners and Forgepoint Capital, Gurevich shares her vision for making identity hygiene as standard as vulnerability management while addressing the next generation of challenges from M&A consolidation to agentic AI automation.
