Semperis Buys MightyID to Expand Identity Security Beyond AD

Semperis purchased an identity resilience startup led by the CEO of Tevora to add backup, recovery, migration and security analysis capabilities around Okta and Ping.

See Also: Identity and Access Management (IAM) Market Guide 2025

The New York-area identity-driven cyber resilience startup said its acquisition of Irvine, California-based MightyID will help organizations understand how changes in one identity system cascade into others, creating hidden privilege escalation and security exposure, said Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman. He said MightyID’s abstraction layer treats identities as unified entities rather than isolated objects.

“Semperis today, I think before the acquisition, was already known as the leading provider when it comes to [Active Directory] and Entra ID for both security protection, and then also obviously the resiliency piece of restoration,” Bresman told Information Security Media Group. “And the addition of MightyID is basically giving us the completeness of the story.”

MightyID was carved out from cybersecurity consultancy Tevora in June 2023, hasn’t disclosed any outside funding, and employed between 12 and 15 people, Bresman said. The company was led since its inception by Ray Zadjmool, who has also served as CEO of Tevora since January 2015. Zadjmool will remain with Tevora, while MightyID COO Chris Steinke will lead the organization under Semperis (see: Backup Roles Key to Cyber Resilience Success).

How Embracing the Identity Abstraction Layer Reduces Risk

Semperis historically focused on protecting Active Directory and Entra ID because those systems form the backbone of identity for most enterprises, but as customer settings evolved, identity infrastructure expanded beyond Microsoft ecosystems to include Okta and Ping. Customers asked Semperis to apply the same level of backup, recovery and security rigor that they had come to expect for Active Directory and Entra ID.

“We have this idea of identity-first security and crisis management driving organizations to achieve what we call true cyber resiliency,” Bresman said. “The way we’re trying to approach it getting to this vision of providing resilience for what we call the identity fabric. If you think about what the identity fabric for most companies actually looks like, in most cases, you will have AD on-prem.”

Rather than viewing identity as fragmented across Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta and Ping, Bresman sees a future in which identities are treated as unified entities that exist independently of any single system. Rather than analyzing identities in isolation within each directory, he said the abstraction layer treats a person as a single entity whose risk profile is shaped by changes across all identity systems.

“What we will be able to say is how does the risk profile of the user change based on the different things that are changing in all the different IDPs,” Bresman said. “We are on this path to do what Semperis was already doing effectively for AD, with this interesting addition of a concept of creating an abstraction layer that allows you to treat identities as an entity that doesn’t matter where they’re coming from.”

Cloud identity providers like Okta and Ping offer flexibility and features that on-premises systems such as Active Directory cannot, but they also introduce dependency risks related to vendor lock-in, service availability and tenant compromise. In the cloud, identity becomes a single point of failure, meaning that if authentication goes down, the organization effectively stops functioning, Bresman said.

“In the cloud world, what typically will happen is that the bad actor will compromise the tenant,” Bresman said. “As soon as they have a privileged account in that tenant, they will lock you out and they will gain control over the tenant without your ability to do anything. Now, because it’s running in the cloud, as opposed to the on-prem world, it’s very hard to gain the control back. This can take days.”

From Active Directory and Entra ID to Okta and Ping Identity

MightyID distinguished itself not just through vision but through execution since its technology had already been adopted by large enterprises, proving that it could operate reliably at scale in complex environments, Bresman said. He said the team understood how Okta tenants are structured, how migrations fail, how permissions break and how to move identity safely between environments.

“The maturity of the solution was a very important factor to us, meaning the technology itself,” Bresman said. “How mature is it, how trustworthy is it, both from our technical teams reviewing the code and from the feedback from the customers. And we found MightyID to be by far the leading solution in the market from that point of view.”

Many organizations adopt multiple identity providers to avoid vendor lock-in, access specific features or mitigate availability risks, which Bresman said increases complexity and introduces new security blind spots. MightyID’s capabilities around tenant-to-tenant failover and identity migration directly address these concerns, with the ability to move between Okta and Entra ID providing operational insurance.

“We actually have what we call hybrid indicators, which basically say you have this group in AD on-prem that should never have been synchronized to Entra, because that group contains privileged accounts,” Bresman said. “And worse than that, you actually now synchronized that group and assigned privileges to it. And now expanding exactly the same story, but now you will have hybrid and multi-cloud views.”

MightyID already has customers using its Okta backup and recovery capabilities, and Semperis plans to integrate those capabilities right into its existing platform alongside AD and Entra ID recovery, he said. Once backup and recovery are unified, the next phase expands security capabilities, bringing posture assessment, indicators of exposure and attack path analysis into Okta. Ping is also part of the road map.

“The identity story becomes more complicated as you add more and more identity providers, and at the same time it remains more and more an attractive target for any cybercriminal,” Bresman said.