Exclusive: SailPoint outlines new era of adaptive identity at Sydney event

SailPoint outlined its vision for the future of enterprise security during its Navigate event in Sydney, unveiling a series of product innovations designed to secure not only human employees but also machines and AI agents across organisations.

"At Navigate, we announced there were eight major product announcements, and those were focused on adaptive identity and moving to this place of real time, and identity and security being more tightly integrated," said Lori Robinson, Vice President of Product Management, SailPoint.

Robinson explained that the announcements addressed the rising complexity of enterprise identities.

"Securing different types of identities, namely agents, and having those product announcements, and the validation from our customers that those align to the problems they're faced with today, was a big part of the energy I got from the customers," said Robinson.

Agentic Focus

SailPoint's new offerings include Agent Identity Security, which helps enterprises discover, govern, and secure AI agents at the entitlement level.

Robinson highlighted the dual challenges of managing existing machine identities while preparing for future agentic systems.

"Before that happens, they already are grappling with machine identities, and those might be service accounts or cloud workloads or APIs, and those exist in their environment today. So how can they discover and manage those?" said Robinson.

She also discussed the importance of understanding and managing privilege. "Effective privilege means looking at all of the different entitlements and giving an effective score," said Robinson.

Tools like SailPoint Observability & Insights support this approach by visualising access relationships, helping organisations apply controls such as zero standing privilege or just-in-time access.

Identity as a Business Enabler

Robinson described the shift in identity security from a productivity tool to a strategic business enabler, affecting multiple C-suite stakeholders.

"Identity is a big part of that. Trust is very important. And what does that mean? It really means making sure that we're implementing the processes and the technologies to secure our environment and secure our platform, so that your data, that your operations are safe as you're using us as a cloud provider," said Robinson.

AI and Adaptive Identity

AI-driven identity governance is a growing area of impact, particularly through automated access recommendations.

"We've seen a massive uptick in the use of that and the acceptance of the recommendation, provided. They look at the recommendation and then accept what was recommended," said Robinson.

Adaptive identity was a central theme of the Navigate announcements. Instead of static on/off access rules, adaptive identity allows context-aware, just-in-time privilege adjustments.

"In today's world without adaptive identity, if you notice that there was a breach of a user, you would likely lock down that user and cut off all of their access," said Robinson. "Adaptive world. We have context, and we understand which of those entitlements are the most privileged, and we quarantine or lock down just those entitlements so that they can access the majority of their work," said Robinson.

Robinson noted that adaptive identity maintains productivity while allowing administrators to mitigate risk continuously, extending to session-level monitoring, compromised devices, and real-time threat containment.

What's Ahead?

SailPoint plans to expand capabilities in privilege security posture management, real-time authorisation, and real-time threat detection, unifying identity and security teams while managing AI and machine identities alongside humans.

"Identity is the control. I don't think that is going away just with the massive distribution of systems and applications and now agents and services out there," said Robinson. "I really do think it's autonomous and adaptive. The scale of identities we have to manage is beyond what the human can do. I think we're going to have to rely on AI to help us with our controls," said Robinson.

Robinson also highlighted the cultural shift needed in organisations regarding identity security.

"While they are compliant, they're not reducing risk," said Robinson. "It's a different mindset. It's really a cultural shift around how do you think about identity? Is it just for compliance? Is it just product for productivity? It needs to be about security as well," said Robinson.