SailPoint’s Chief Product Officer Paul Trulove on Cloud Governance

Innovation is the hallmark of society these days – if we can dream it, we can do it. In this age, the adoption of new technologies such as cloud and artificial intelligence are accelerating the pace of innovation to levels we’ve never seen before. Businesses have found themselves sitting on a gold mine of technologies aimed at helping them do business faster and better. Cloud solutions are at the center of this transformative time. But what is keeping all of that new, cloud-based tech secure, compliant and running efficiently? Identity governance is. As we have watched the digital transformation take hold, SailPoint has been marching ahead, evolving ahead of our customers’ business and IT needs. Today, we have several key insights from our Chief Product Officer Paul Trulove, who shares what our latest offerings in cloud governance are all about and how they are bringing value for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Here is what he had to say.

Why is cloud governance the next evolution of identity?

When you dig into it, we have enterprises today who are running their businesses on multiple cloud infrastructures with hundreds, if not thousands, of applications deployed. However, many organizations have yet to deploy identity controls to these new environments. This can leave key systems and data exposed – as we’ve seen in several recent, high-profile cloud breaches.

That’s where cloud governance comes in – the majority of enterprises are using AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and it only makes sense that an identity program would allow them to see and govern all within those platforms. Cloud governance extends identity across this new landscape, and provides the organization one place where they can go to see all of the access their users have. They can use identity to keep pace with digital transformation in a secure and compliant way. For SailPoint, that has taken shape in the form of our new services, SailPoint Cloud Access Management and SailPoint Workload Privilege Management.

To that point, how do these two new services fit with what we are already offering for SailPoint Predictive Identity™ services?

This is just the evolution of identity governance, plain and simple. Just like the other SailPoint Predictive Identity services, our new cloud governance solutions offer organizations the power to automate, streamline and secure the delivery of access within their cloud environments. And because cloud environments tend to be extremely complex, and the access within these systems can’t be managed by humans alone, we are leveraging an AI and ML based approach to help simplify the complexity and make it manageable.

What that means in practice is having complete visibility over your cloud platforms and the workloads running in your cloud environments – from who has access and what has access to managing the lifecycle of access appropriately. And no two companies are alike, so being able to form fit their identity programs to the systems they have in place is key.

So as enterprises look to address access to cloud platforms and workloads, how can our cloud governance solutions help enterprises from a security and efficiency standpoint?

Modern IT teams are looking to implement a more continuous integration and deployment processes as they build and deploy in the cloud. It’s no secret that managing these very dynamic cloud environments is a constant battle. It is difficult to keep up with the pace of change as new workloads are coming online and configurations are constantly changing.

SailPoint’s new cloud governance solutions help manage the constant churn by allowing organizations to keep tabs on access across cloud platforms and the workloads that are running in them. Our graph-based model helps cloud teams visualize access in a new way, while the policy engine keeps an eye on access that might pose a security threat. In addition, we are able to help lock down administrative access to cloud workloads so that information is properly secured. This keeps business, IT and audit happy and lets them sleep better at night.