1Password’s Bold Move to Secure the Agentic Era

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. My next guest is Sanjay Ramnath. Uh, Sanjay is the VP, a VP at 1Password.

Sanjay, I don't know if there's more to VP than VP of what or whatever, but that's what I got on the teleprompter, that's what I went with. Welcome, welcome to Techstrong TV. It's great to have you on.

Thanks, Alan. It's good to be here as well. Yep.

So VP can cover up a lot of sins. Give us an idea, Sanjay, of, of kind of what's your role at 1Password, and more importantly, how did you come to be here? Yeah.

So my role at 1Password is, to convert the cool tech, that we're building into consumable messaging and positioning and, and stories. Uh, so my official title is VP of Product and Solutions Marketing. I spent, oh my God, a couple of decades or more, not to date myself, in the cybersecurity space.

No, you're in good company. Don't worry. In, in the cybersecurity space, I have been a, a product person for a very long time.

I've held product management roles. Um, I started my career as a developer. Spent a bunch of years writing code, designing chips, and then switched into product management, have run product teams, at, startups, taken, companies public or participated in taking companies public.

Um, and, and yeah, product management, product marketing, those are all, near and dear to my heart. And, I've got connected to, 1Password and was super excited by the mission, and, and decided to put all that experience to use in helping 1Password, transform identity security. I love it.

You know, I'm sitting here listening to you, Sanjay, and I'm thinking to myself, fifteen years from now, people who are fifteen years behind us, they're sitting at this desk and they're gonna say, "Well, I was a developer originally. " And then what are they gonna say? And then AI started writing it all, and I bec- you know, I had to do something else, or I just, I became the human in the loop.

What, what a different kind of path these people are ha- gonna have compared to your path, right? That's- Yeah. It's a changed world.

I think so. I, I, I think, I think the, the, most commonly used title going forward is going to be, I'm a builder. Um- Mm-hmm.

I think everyone's gonna become a builder of- Yes ... you know, in, in the, in the, world that, that, you know, we lived in, you know, you had developers who were treated as builders, and then everyone else- Right ... was a user or an employee.

Yeah. And with AI, look, as a knowledge worker, I'm, I'm not a developer. I don't-- It's been years since I wrote my last piece of code, but I can write code an application today, I can build, and I can deploy an agent.

And so I think, I think the, the most commonly used, title is going to be, yeah, I work for 1Password, I'm a builder. Abso- I, I agree with you a hundred percent. You know, it's so funny 'cause I, I talk to friends and, and like, like you, Sanjay, I have friends, we came up together as, you know, practitioners, single contributors, and now they're C-levels, and they're SVPs, and they're, you know, entrepreneurs.

And the universally, almost universally, the, the what I get from them is what a great time this is. I could build anything, and I don't need hundreds of people to build it either. I can basically build it myself.

Yeah. Well, with AI obviously. But the, the, the power of that is, is p- it's powerful.

It's gonna be interesting to see. 'Cause we talk about, you know, AI, jobs lost to AI, all of these builders are going to create, 'cause that's another word for builder is creator, isn't it? And- Absolutely.

Yeah. We're, we're gonna really see it. Hey, you know, I...

Look, I'm, as I told you off camera, we're a 1Password cust- I hope that's not a security thing by telling people we use 1Password. But, we, we are a 1Password customer here, and we're very familiar with it and happy with it. But for the people who, who maybe are not familiar with 1Password, Sanjay, you mentioned the mission, right?

But go a little deeper. Yeah. I, I, let me, let me kind of state a very simple, fact about 1Password.

Our mission, apart from the tech and, and all of that, is to make things easy, right? We're always been about making the, this easy thing the secure thing or the secure thing the easy thing. And we, started life as, an, a password manager.

We built, an amazing tool for consumers really to secure their digital life, especially as more people were transacting life over the internet, with SaaS and, and apps and all of that. Um, and then we took that, that, that same ethos and, expanded our footprint to, to businesses. And, what was kind of unique about the 1Password approach to security is that, our consumer heritage, the fact that we built something that people loved, really acted as a tailwind as we moved into businesses.

Most of our business users were like, "Well, hey, I already use this. My, my kids use it, my family uses it, my parents use it. " Um, and we've just been building on that, on that heritage.

Uh, today we provide, you know, a, an extremely powerful, vault that stores credentials and secrets all the way from users', credentials, credit cards, passwords, to developer secrets and API keys, and so on. Uh, we provide solutions to manage SaaS applications and SaaS environments. Uh, we secure devices.

We have a device compliance solution. Uh, and we are, um-Curiously marching towards transforming the model in the AI world, and that's some of the exciting stuff that's, that's up ahead for us. I love it.

com, just the way it's on your title they're seeing on the bottom third of your, their screens right here. That's good. Um, so look, Sanjay, we recorded this on a Friday.

We're about a week, a little, maybe a week and a half, a week and a couple days out of RSAC. RSAC Conference, big security show. You guys have a number of announcements coming out, and I figured, maybe we could jump the shark a little bit and, and get a preview of what you might be talking about at RSA this year.

Yeah, absolutely. I, the, the hypothesis or the problem that, that we are uniquely positioned to solve is that the nature of work has changed, right? Today, you, me, people around us, we have the agency and in the AI world, the economy, if you will, to move fast, which means we choose the tools that we need to move fast.

We can operate on browsers, we can operate on our own devices. And, we've seen this, this massive shift in the identity security operating model, if you will. Um, the, the legacy, where security is managed by a small group of people in a centralized manner with infrastructure that then everything is behind, an SSO or an IDP gateway.

That is an extent of this new world where work is done at the edge of the business. It's done at the endpoint. It's done by developers deploying copilots and agents.

So the solution we're gonna be launching, at RSA, and announcing in the next few days really, is, called 1Password Unified Access. It brings, our capabilities together under a unified platform, and those capabilities are starting with the foundation, which is the vault, our ability to vault secure credentials and secrets for developers and users. Um, our ability to get signals, at the endpoint.

Today, we have a massive presence and scale at the endpoint across millions of browsers and devices. Um, with our device security solution, we can see who's doing what at the endpoint. We can discover agents, we can discover AI tools, we can discover credentials and secrets in the open that are not secured properly.

Um, and, our ability to integrate within the ecosystem. We've been investing heavily in integrations all the way from, integrating with IDE, platforms to, SCM, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines, with browsers, with agentic browsers, through to integrating with SOC workflows, and this is our user's API, announcement that you'll see in the next few days as well, where we're enabling, as an ecosystem of APIs as well as SDKs so developers, SOC practitioners can integrate 1Password into their workflows and automating things like restoring and revoking, identity access, for example, when risk or, events are triggered in SOC, envi- in, in, in SOC workflows. Um, so Unified Access really brings all of this together and provides a solution that acts as a governance layer for human, machine, and agentic identities.

So broadly speaking, there are three sets of capabilities. Unified Access allows you to discover agentic AI, credentials, secrets at the endpoint, so visibility and discover- discoverability of what's happening in the environment. That's number one.

Second, once you discover risk, once you know what's happening, it provides a way to secure the, the risk. So you can quickly bring the credentials and secrets under governance, make sure they are vaulted, and also provision them, as you mentioned, in that continuous manner. It's not static authentication anymore.

It's provisioning them every time access is requested and having that continuous authorization, continuous, credentials brokering, if you will, for agentic human and machine workflows. And the third bucket of capabilities is around auditing. Who did what?

Why? How do you create the chain of custody? How do you create attribution loops so when humans deploy agents, you know what agent, the what, what the agent did and who did it operate on behalf of, and was it provisioned with the right privileges and, and the right scope of privileges?

So that's really the net of what we're, we're, we're, we're, announcing in the next few days leading up to RSA, which is a culmination of all the work we've been doing so far over the past several years, building on that foundation and now covering humans, machines, and agents with this unified approach. Excellent. I love it.

Um, you know, in the nick of time too because as you mentioned, things are really kind of shifting under our feet, right? I've been in tech a long time, security a long time. I don't remember such change like we're, we're undergoing right now.

It's gonna be a, it's gonna be an, an interesting time. Sanjay, I mentioned the website. For people who are interested maybe in finding out specifically about the Unified Access platform, user API for, their partners, but they're not gonna be at RSA.

Not everyone goes to San Francisco. What, what's their best, what's their best bet? com is the best place to get started.

So if you start from there, you will find, more information on, the products. So you'll find that y- the, there's a website for the Unified Access product. com, which gets a little deeper into how our platform can serve developers.

It talks about the various integrations we have to integrate Pa- 1Password into developer, workflows. com that gives you start demos and interactive demos, so get hands-on with the product and get a look, get, get more familiar with the actual capabilities themselves. So those are, those would be good starting points.

And you'll see a lot more coming out over the next few days, with the blogs and resources that you can use to find out, get more information about, about Unified Access. I love it. That's good stuff, man.

Sanjay, best of luck to you. Say hello to Dave and Wendy for me as well. I hope to see them at RSA.

Maybe are you going to RSA? Yeah, I will be at RSA. Dave and Wendy are, are, rock stars.

They will be at RSA as well. Absolutely. So we'll be at Broadcast Alley in Moscone West all week videoing.

Do come by, say hello. Absolutely. I look forward to seeing you, Alan.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Sanjay Ramnath, VP 1Password here on Techstrong giving us a little RSA preview. We'll be live at RSA. I think it's the 22nd.

Is that Monday is our seminar? Our, 23rd, excuse me, is Monday. 22nd, Sunday.

And, we're doing our Securing AI Native Dev. It's the tenth year. We usually do the DevSecOps both thing there on Moscone.

And then we'll be, as I said, all week at Mo- at Moscone West on Broadcast Alley broadcasting live. So stay tuned for that. We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong TV.

We'll be back in a minute.