Skip to Main Content

Elevate to Embrace Identity

The SailPoint Crew recently had the pleasure of attending one of the country’s leading banking and financial technology conference last month in Las Vegas – Fiserv Forum 2019. This conference brought out the best and brightest in fintech, innovations, and rising financial institutions.

With this year’s conference theme being ‘Elevate,’ Jeff Yabuki, Fiserv CEO, delivered a powerful keynote address that addressed three challenges he sees for this industry:

· The Speed of Change

· Finding Deeper Engagement

· Filtering Out the Noise

As you delve into these key areas, it’s critical to recognize the importance of how these can impact your institution’s overall security, privacy, and compliance efforts, if not properly approached. SailPoint sees financial institutions navigate these challenges successfully when they adopt a comprehensive identity governance program. Identity governance allows organizations to answer three key questions: “Who has access to what?”, “Should they have access?”, and “What are they doing with that access?” These key items allow financial institutions the ability to establish a secure digital foundation for which change can occur in a safe and compliant manner.

Let’s apply this to Jeff Yabuki’s identified challenges and examine what that future looks like for IT and Security when identity governance is part of the picture.

The Speed of Change

Banking organizations today exist in a state of transition. It’s what many are referring to as ‘Digital Transformation.’ To stay relevant and maintain a competitive advantage, an institution is adopting new technologies and business practices faster than ever before. In the context of the changes being taken on by financial institutions, this means more users, more apps, and more data. This burden is too much for mere humans to manage. I spoke with many banks and credit unions, of varying sizes, who agreed there are just not enough resources in our IT / Security budgets to keep up with the technology advancements.

The good news is that there are institutions who have taken on their digital transformation in a mindful way. They have instituted intelligent identity governance programs, creating an ‘identity-aware’ infrastructure; providing tight controls over user access and safeguarding access to sensitive information. By protecting their infrastructure and managing users and their digital identities, they gained both visibility and control.

The secret to keeping up was automating their governance to be more responsive to technology changes and innovations. SailPoint Identity can help identify the tasks that can be automated and help implement strong policies that can adapt to changes that occur, all while keeping compliant. SailPoint’s Cloud Identity Platform reduces the burden for institutions so that they may embrace speed.

Finding Deeper Engagement

Creating a deeper engagement for customers is also creating the need for a deeper engagement between IT and their user, applications, and data. Digital transformation is about moving the perinate data closer to the people who need it. I heard from banks at the show allowing a distributed workforce that includes partners, contractors, bots, and employees require new software tools and best practices. Institutions are now adopting cloud-based applications to meet these needs.

SailPoint’s Cloud Identity connects and integrates with all of your applications on-premises and in the cloud, to share rich identity context information with your existing IT and security investments. Additionally, SailPoint partners with industry leaders across a spectrum of technologies that enable organizations to integrate their entire infrastructure to gain identity context and visibility.

Filtering out the noise

Jeff Yabuki said in his keynote, “rapid changes brings with it a lot of noise.” Yes, as I mentioned earlier, more users, more apps, and more data. Attendees went on to say more regulations, more audits, more security concerns. What they were sure to tell me is that they didn’t get more resources, IT staff, or budget to match up with the expectations.

Many of the financial institutions I spoke to have resigned to manual processes for security and compliance even though the burden was unsustainable. They hadn’t thought of Identity Governance solutions as a way to cut through the noise and reorganize their processes.

But more than that, Identity Governance tools automate the mundane and filter out the exceptions that are difficult to see with human eyes. Thus improving detection/investigation speeds, reducing damage from security incidents, and achieving a better standard of compliance. Sailpoint Cloud Identity delivers this automation in a way that is easy to adopt and implement.

Even further, SailPoint Predictive Identity™ is delivering a new world of adaptive security and continuous compliance that makes identity easy, transparent, and autonomous. Built on big data and machine learning (ML) technology, Sailpoint Predictive Identity enables an AI-driven approach to identity governance.

Fiserv Forum 2019 was indeed bigger and bolder, elevating what banking would look like in the future. However, the attendees I spoke with wondered if they could truly meet the demands of this new elevated banking future. With Identity Governance, they can. See you at the next show.


Discussion