Palo Alto Networks concluded its biggest acquisition to date with the completion of its $25 billion CyberArk purchase.

First announced last summer, the blockbuster buy was the second-biggest deal in the entire financial space for 2025, pipped only by Google's $32 billion bid for cloud security firm Wiz.

Founded in 1999, CyberArk focuses on identity and privileged access management (IAM/PAM), with its end-to-end Identity Security Platform covering multiple identity types across varied environments.

Headquartered in Petach-Tikva, Israel, the company counts more than 10,000 enterprises as clients, including Coca‑Cola Hellenic Bottling Company, Panasonic, and Ukraine’s Parkovyi Data Center.

Upon announcement of the deal, Palo Alto Networks signaled the acquisition would bolster its identity service offerings in the networking space, building on the identity-aware secure access service edge (SASE) additions to its Prisma Access platform via recent Talon Cyber Security and CloudGenix acquisitions.

As explored by SDxCentral, this would turn the giant into an end-to-end cybersecurity platform, rivaling the likes of Zscaler, Cisco, and Fortinet. With IAM/PAM capabilities – components of increasingly networking-relevant zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and SASE architectures – Palo Alto Networks aims to rival identity stacks from the likes of Microsoft and Okta.

Analysts agreed on Palo Alto's ambitions, although they said packaging was key: identity buyers are not in the traditional cloud and network customer set for the firm.

Identity ignited

Since the announcement, Palo Alto's interest in CyberArk has turned out to be a shrewd bet thanks to all things agentic, where with a greater number of AI agents on the network, the harder it is for security teams to work out who's human and who isn't. Soon after the CyberArk news, other identity solutions began appearing in the market.

Upon this week's closure of the deal, Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, said: "The emerging wave of AI agents will require us to secure every identity – human, machine, and agent. This is why we moved decisively by announcing our intent to acquire CyberArk last July and am excited to have product integration begin.

"For our customers, this means the end of 'identity silos.' They can now manage privileged access across their entire hybrid cloud environment from the same company they trust for network security and security operations – to ensure they are secure in the AI era."

At the London leg of Palo Alto's Ignite tour, Richard Turner, EMEA president for CyberArk, told an audience including SDxCentral that the firm offers "an end-to-end solution that really is able to secure the full spectrum of identities, human, machine, and AI," while point products and point solutions from an identity point of view "really just kick the can down the road."

"AI expands the threat surface, and the autonomy of the agents means that actually it's neither human nor machine," Turner added. "We really believe that AI agents are a very distinctive category of identities that we need to think about and manage in a very different way."

In a nod to Israel's position as a global cybersecurity leader, Palo Alto Networks said it would pursue a secondary listing on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), on which CyberArk had yet to list. The firm will adopt the CYBR ticker on the TASE, while keeping the PANW ticker on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.

According to the firm, the Israel listing would position it as the largest company listed on the TASE by market cap.