Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Saviynt CEO Amit Saha (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other driver, I imagine, is the selection of different products. There is so much innovation happening in the cybersecurity space. It has become very difficult for small companies innovating on specific point products to get into the Global 2000. The Global 2000 CIO’s are really swamped with new products to absorb and evaluate. A specialized managed service provider who does all that product and technology selection would be very attractive.

Amit Saha: Managing and abstracting the customer from the complexity of the tools and integrated them is critical. Another aspect is, identity is moving closer to the business workflow. We have a product called third-party access governance. That access governance in Global 2000 customers varies from industry to industry.

For example, in a manufacturing industry, they have the manufacturer and supplier relationships. You are continuously onboarding supplier companies. There is the concept of onboarding the supplier and giving someone the ability to manage their supplier’s access. You have different users with different access. The third-party access governance is a very key role as organizations reinvent themselves in terms of exploring different supply chains. That’s more on the manufacturing side.

Similarly, healthcare is continuously evolving. They are looking at how to quickly bring on external physicians and add them to the roster. How do you securely onboard an external physician? How do you validate their certifications? Based on that, you give them appropriate access to different systems and different data. Identity becomes a critical aspect.

One of the key aspects for any MSP to offer to their customers is not just identity as a technology, but identity as a business enabler. How do you now refine the identity solution to be specific for different industry verticals? 

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Who would you say are the leaders in the MSP space who are at the forefront? 

Amit Saha: Deloitte is one of the leaders in the MSP space. They have looked at MSP from a holistic standpoint. They have a fledgling cloud security practice. You have Accenture that offers something similar. Then you have MSPs which are fit-to-purpose. As MSP expands from Global 2000 all the way to the SMB side of the market, there are different price points and different value points. You have providers like Simyo who play an active role in offering MSP services.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you from a small startup point of view. If you were running a new cybersecurity startup, would you go-to market through the enterprise or would you go to market through the MSP now?

Amit Saha: The MSPs will be slower to react in bringing a startup into their portfolio simply because they are looking at it as a prepackaged set of tools that they want to take to their customers at all points in time. For a startup to get embedded into an MSP, they will still need to have some market base where they can show that there is enough interest in the market. They are bringing something new for the MSP that can further augment their business-centric security solution.

For the startups, there has to be a direct way to market. It could also be that you’re addressing the machine identity problem. You will need to go directly to those stakeholders. As your products become more relevant, you can go to the MSP.

Sramana Mitra: It’s becoming very difficult because there’re so many startups in the market. 

Amit Saha: Absolutely. Identity, overall, has been a very hot market. There are a lot more newer approaches coming to the market in terms of solving the identity problems. Identity itself is evolving from human to machine identity, from regular enterprise user access to privileged access. Then you have sensitive access somewhere in between. How do you look at identity from an IoT standpoint? Even the RPS bots have identities.

As you have machine-to-machine or application-to-application identities, identity plays a very crucial aspect in the API security as well. There is definitely an opportunity for startups to look at the unique security problems and challenges and address it. For someone to be successful, the key is how do you deliver that solution in a seamless and effective manner? How do you integrate with other players or other approaches in the identity ecosystem?

That allows you to operate a little bit more organically and fit into the bigger IT security or the identity portfolio. I still feel that there is a lot of opportunity out there. The outcomes are many. With someone like CloudKnox being added into Microsoft, there are many such opportunities out there.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Saviynt CEO Amit Saha
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