Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Saviynt CEO Amit Saha (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into your own space. Talk to me about what are the key drivers and key customer pain points that you’re addressing. What are the trends within your space? Tell me about some of the white spaces within your segment where there is opportunity for innovation and where new entrepreneurs can plug some of those gaps that you are not working on.

Amit Saha: The biggest trend right now in the identity and security business is around zero trust. If you look at the Biden administration, they launched an initiative with different vendors to look at zero trust. It means different things to different people. Zero trust is an approach and mindset. Based on a context, you make decisions on the fly on how much you want to trust and how much access do you want the user to have.

As a mindset, it has evolved into the IGA space. What Saviynt has done in the IGA space is what we call EIC [Enterprise Identity Cloud]. We have embedded a lot of intelligence tools which are continuously evaluating the risk associated with every request and then either amplifying or reducing the risk level for that user and dialing down the need for more governance or less governance for those identities.

Because we have embedded very strong zero trust capabilities, we are able to extrapolate that and deliver it to all the different products that Saviynt offers. We have various zero trust capabilities built within our IGA platform, privilege access management, as well as our application and third-party access governance products. Zero trust is a big theme.

The reason why zero trust is relevant is because of two things. One is, the overall IT landscape is changing. You have a lot of cloud-first trends. The way people are accessing systems is also changing. You have people who are working remotely. Sometimes they are working from the office. There are a lot of opportunities for different vendors to come together and create a strong cohesive framework with that zero trust as a mindset and then offer inherent zero trust capabilities within each of the product offerings.

There are opportunities to build new products. There are opportunities to look at building specific products from a zero trust perspective. One one side, you have zero trust network access, which allows you to dynamically give access at a network level based on whether you’re accessing it from your home or office. There are other opportunities to look at zero trust within the entire end-to-end  access that a user has and potentially come up with new products.

The second aspect is, as identity becomes more commercialized or democratized, there is a need for something called distributed identity. At the end of the day, you want the user who might be collaborating with you as an employee or contractor. You want to build a level of trust at every point in time. There are still many avenues to be explored. 

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Do you work with smaller players? 

Amit Saha: Absolutely. The smaller vendors are early to innovate and bring that to our customers. Our approach is to deliver business solutions and not just products. We have been collaborating with various smaller players out there to ensure that the customer gets the best value. Before the Microsoft acquisition of CloudKnox, we have been actively working across multiple customers. That relationship has further strengthened once they were acquired by Microsoft. We are also working with smaller vendors like One Cosmos who is doing a lot around the whole distributed identity model itself and how you prove the identity of a user.

Sramana Mitra: I learned a lot from you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Saviynt CEO Amit Saha
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