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An Identity Moon Shot

As I reflect on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, I am still in awe of all that we accomplished during that period in our history. The moon shot on July 20th, 1969 not only captured the world’s attention but imagining what can be realized from an impactful goal. Okay so yes, I am a space nerd. Like a wide-eyed child, I consumed just about every article, video and TV special about the anniversary of the moon landing.

What I find most amazing about the moon landing is not just the fact that we accomplished such a monumental task with such limited technology compared to today, but the way in which we set out such a visionary goal “to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade.” There was a quote from the Jim Lovell’s (NASA astronaut on Gemini 7 and 12 and Apollo 8 and the famous Apollo 13 flight) book Lost Moon, who put it best…”It wasn’t a miracle (that we landed on the moon), we just decided to go.”

At the time when Kennedy made his famous “We choose to go to the moon” speech, spacecraft for moon landings didn’t exist. There were no spacesuits, no computers for space navigation. In fact, we had only been in low orbit space for about 15 minutes up to that point. But he made a powerful challenge that would require a radical reimagining of what space flight could be. Next Generation of Identity – SailPoint Predictive Identity

That’s how we look at SailPoint Predictive Identity. Okay of course not at the same scale as the moon landing, but in terms of the future of identity. This is the vision that we see and are innovating towards today. SailPoint Predictive Identity is all about changing the face of identity – removing the traditional complexity that is often associated with it and making it easy and doable for even the non-technical. That’s how important it is to us – we believe identity governance is vital and foundational to securing organizations’ today, and we’ve taken the lead in making sure that there is nothing stopping organizations from being able to benefit from it.

To be clear, this isn’t merely a ‘vision’ statement. This is our strategy and direction. This is SailPoint putting a stake in the ground just like they did at NASA and revolutionizing identity, yet again.

As an innovator in identity governance, we have launched the next generation of identity. Our customers have told us that the next big hurdle they are facing is being able to manage the deluge of users’ apps and data, the new and mounting data privacy and compliance regulations, and an ever-evolving threat landscape that includes more sophisticated attack methods. All of this is more than any human to handle. Actually, most of the Apollo landing was automated by the computers as there was just too much information and data for the astronauts to manage on their own. It wasn’t until the last minute that Neil Armstrong switched off the autopilot, took control and flew the spacecraft manually to a landing.

That is where we see AI and ML technologies playing an integral role, providing deep visibility and insights to the risk that you can’t see as well as enabling IT teams to know what can be automated safely so that they can focus on more critical high-priority items.

Our Identity Governance Mission

While it sounds like I’m describing a future state that is years away, this new world of identity is here today but also sets our mission going forward. As a result of our space exploration, there were so many inventions and new products that came about such as LED lights, memory foam, new photography, video and cordless technology and of course you can’t forget about Tang.

Here are just some of the ways that we envision SailPoint Predictive Identity will help reduce risk, improve compliance, speed the time to value and reduce the cost of deployment:

· Anticipate user access needs using a predictive approach based on a user’s identity profile or peer group access.

· Spot risky behavior with outlier detection highlighting users whose access doesn’t align with their peer groups.

· Provide continuous identity monitoring delivering an “always on” approach to role mining including user activity and behavior.

· Quickly shape and evolve your compliance program with AI suggested policies using machine learning to launch certification campaigns on risky user access.

SailPoint Predictive Identity helps to take the complexity out of identity and finally makes it easy for organizations with basic IT teams to embrace it, where in years’ past this wouldn’t have been possible. This new patented, approach to identity enables more organizations the chance to fully embrace identity governance, anticipating user access needs in a dynamic way and allows for much quicker time-to-value right out of the gate. This alone can be a big barrier to entry for some companies, particularly those without an identity team or resources on-staff.

The term “moon shot” isn’t literal of course since it took almost a decade with several key milestones to get to the moon. But a moonshot is about looking beyond where you can actually see and envisioning an answer. This is how we envision SailPoint Predictive Identity and the answers that it can provide for identity today and in the future. Learn how SailPoint Predictive Identity, the next generation cloud identity platform, can help to launch your identity program today.


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