The Third Wave of Identity: Securing Agentic AI at RSAC

First, as I mentioned, our first guest is Vibhuti Sinha, and he's with Saviynt. Saviynt. Saviynt.

They say Saviynt. Vibhuti, welcome to Techstrong TV. Thank you, Alan.

Thank you very much, and very good morning to you. So I'm going to shut this. We're not going to use it.

Vibhuti, let's start with a little bit about you. Bring us up to how you came to be at Saviynt, a little bit of your career path. Alan, I am a professional working only in identity security for the last 23 plus years now.

That's all I know. That's all I do. For the first decade or so, I was busy implementing identity solutions for large corporates, big enterprises.

I learned the ropes of why this market and this domain is so specialized. And then, 2012 is when the CEO of Saviynt, Mr. " And I asked him what it is.

" So that's how my journey started. And from since then, I have been working with Saviynt and doing more on the product side. And since then, it has been a great ride with what we have been accomplishing at Saviynt.

Very good. What's your present position at Saviynt? I'm the chief product officer with Saviynt, responsible- So you're running product?

Yes. Very good. Look, so you're doing this, you said, since 2012.

Mm-hmm. At Saviynt. Yes.

Another overnight sensation, right? You guys have been at it a while. Of course, a lot has changed, right?

Identity back then was primarily people identity. And we went through the machine identity. Mm-hmm.

Now API identities. Now, of course, we're dealing with AI and agentic identities. But regardless of who sits behind the identity or what sits behind the identity, there's commonalities in here in terms of what we try to do with identity-based security, right?

Yeah. Which is, to me, the aspects are understanding the identity of this entity that is trying to access something, and then managing what control they have. Yeah.

Right? And IAM is, if you will. Now, since 2012, Vibhuti, how has Saviynt's mission changed, or has it?

So I'll give you a very snapshot of what Saviynt did and how this industry changed. In 2010, Alan, you won't believe, less than 3% of the identity projects worldwide were successful. Mm-hmm.

Let the numbers sink in, less than 3%. That's sad. The reason was that identity implementations were very cumbersome.

It was unheard of upgrading an identity platform, which would take usually three to six months. So when 2012, when Sachin called me and said: "I want to offer IGA as a service," it was never done. It was completely charting an unknown territory.

And I said: "Look, I don't know anything about it. " Right. So that's how we started.

Saviynt became the first company on this planet to take a complex problem like IGA and delivering it on cloud. And at that point of time, you rightly mentioned that identity was all about humans. It was more of a compliance checkbox.

It was more of, like, I have to do something to meet my audit requirements. I had a very nice discussion with a famous financial company CTO, and he said: "Look, there is nothing cool about identity. It's like paying taxes.

" And that's what we are doing. But from there on, what happened in 2016, 2017, when the security breaches started getting up more, what we started seeing was identity became the launchpad of leading the breaches. So from compliance, identity became a strong pillar for securing your organizations.

That became a big shift, and that also resulted in Saviynt coming up with a platform which not only looks at IGA, but other parts of identity. So third-party identities, privileged identities. Even though we were still talking about humans, but the convergence became the new norm, and that was the second thing, big innovation, what Saviynt did at that point of time.

And then from there on, as the growth of cloud, non-human identities, and now, of course, AI has come, identity is no longer just a security play, it's a business transformation player. And that is the biggest shift, what we are seeing, and that's what we are here, here at RSA, with our latest launch, what we did on securing AI and securing AI agents. This is a third wave of innovation, what we did at Saviynt.

Excellent. You know what? Without really knowing the whole story, I sort of had that kind of time, or the progression- Mm-hmm ...

of how it is. Before we get into the news from RSA, Saviynt, well, people will see the lower thirds on our screen, so they see how it's spelled. Yeah.

But how can they get more information about Saviynt? Many different ways. One, of course, going onto the Saviynt web app, like web pages, knowing about the company.

Our brand marketing team and product marketing team have done enough information about putting Saviynt on social. There are a lot of marketing events, and there are a lot of events happening here at RSA. So if you are here at RSA, come meet us.

We have a booth. We are also here to meet with a lot of our customers and partners. So different avenues, different ways in which you can learn and start partnering and collaborating with Saviynt.

I love it. What a great thing. All right.

Let's circle back and talk about news here. Today is a very, very big day, Alan. I'm really excited.

I'm really pumped. This is a culmination of all the hard work we have been doing for the last two years. See, if you think about, as I mentioned, that AI and the identity being the pillar of business transformation, why is that the case?

If you look at AI agents, these are your new types of identities which are now being created. Earlier, any company who wishes to secure their human employees or privileged identities, they were looking at a player like Saviynt. Today, every company on this planet is implementing AI in some form or fashion, which means that every company now needs securing their identities, the new types of identities.

And with today's launch, what Saviynt has done is it is addressing three very simple questions. If you have AI in your organization, or AI agents in your organization, can you find them? Because that will alleviate any kind of shadow AI concerns.

Second, can you govern them? Which means that do you have a process to onboard, offboard, register these new types of identities? Because with employees, you have a very structured process of getting them into your HR systems.

What are you doing about AI identities? And third, which is the fundamental shift on how agents or AI agents work as compared to other types of identities, is are they doing what they're supposed to do? Are they accessing the systems what they're supposed to do?

This is the fundamental or the biggest shift on this new type of identities because agents act autonomously. You cannot predict what they're going to do at runtime. You cannot predict what they're going to exactly touch the systems.

And that is why enforcing your policies in real time becomes extremely imperative. So Saviynt's today's launch addresses all these three questions with our platform. I love it.

Now, RSA, RSAC, excuse me. RSAC is bigger than ever. Vibhuti, there's so much news, so much of it around AI and agents.

I'm hearing, we put out our newsletter, I got feedback from listeners and watchers, readers. How do we separate the signal from the noise here? Everyone here is making these announcements around securing AI, using AI to secure things, agents, securing agentics.

Succinctly, if you want, and you can look right into this camera, why is this one of the things they need to pay attention to, specifically what Saviynt is doing? Obviously, rising tide lifts all boats. We're all talking about the same thing.

Why is this stand out? Good point, Alan, and it should be a question which every organization should be asking. I believe, absolutely.

If you look at any solution in the market, everybody's trying to play in their swim lane. As I mentioned, the three questions, the three pillars, every vendor you talk to, they will be addressing one part of that pillar or two parts of the pillar because that's their strength. When we started working on this two years ago, we realized that if we are going to build a comprehensive solution, we have to address all three.

Which means one of the pillars was not Saviynt strength, and we had to realize that this is new for us. This is something we have to build from scratch. We stood up new teams.

We stood up new people who had done this before. And the most important part, we did not want to do this in a silo manner. So we identified enterprises who were willing to do a design partnership with us.

So one, the solution, what we launched today addresses all three parts of the equation, which no other vendor has done it. They're all either addressing one third or two third. We are addressing the entire platform.

And we have done with public large enterprises where the solution has been tested. It is running in production, which tells me that this is battle tested. You have proof.

We are not just talking from a marketing standpoint. And, we have referenceable customers who can vouch on what we have done. I love it.

Give them the website one more time. com. Thank you.

You know what? That's our first interview. It's a wrap here at Techstrong on...

We're in Moscone West, but at our outlet here on the Broadcast Alley. We're going to be back at the top of the hour with our Techstrong gang live. Vibhuti is going to be one of our gang members today.

So it's his first gang. It should be pretty cool. We're going to have John Swartz and a few other people.

Stay tuned for that. We're going to be live all day. I have a feeling this is just the first agentic AI interview we're going to do today, but we'll be talking more about it.

You're watching Techstrong TV live at RSAC.