Enterprise Account Executive

SailPoint announces modernization capabilities for both cloud and on-premises identity security. New SailPoint Human Fabric capabilities and SailPoint IdentityIQ 9.0 release deliver security and governance built for enterprise scale, ensuring no customer is left behind in their security evolution. Today at its annual flagship conference, Navigate, SailPoint, Inc. announced a significant modernization across its entire identity platform. The company unveiled new enterprise-scale capabilities for SailPoint Human Fabric and the release of IdentityIQ 9.0, a major update to its on-premises solution. These updates demonstrate a unified commitment to modernizing identity security for every customer, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. The announcements address a challenge facing the industry as a whole: most identity governance infrastructure can't keep pace with how enterprises operate today. SailPoint is closing that gap with substantive updates that re-platform core services for scale and strengthen governance, not simple UI refreshes. Chandra Gnanasambandam, EVP of Product and Chief Technology Officer at SailPoint, said "Most vendors ask their customers to choose between a growth story or a stewardship story, but the reality of the modern enterprise is not that simple. Today, we are delivering on both fronts. We are advancing the frontier of cloud identity security with Human Fabric while also demonstrating our commitment to the customers who rely on IdentityIQ for identity security. This is one modernization effort on two fronts, ensuring every customer has a path forward without compromise." Governance built for enterprise scale: The SailPoint Human Fabric SailPoint announced three new major updates for Human Fabric, its cloud-native identity security product, designed to operate at enterprise scale: * Access certifications enhancements: A completely re-platformed certification engine built to handle enterprise-scale access reviews without record limits or data delays. The new engine removes the need for administrators to manually split large campaigns and includes a faster, more intuitive reviewer interface and cryptographic, GxP-compliant sign-off for regulated industries. * Proactive Separation of Duties (SoD): Moving beyond after-the-fact alerting, SailPoint's enhanced SoD engine provides real-time evaluation that proactively blocks toxic access combinations at the moment of request. It uniquely flags conflicts created by other pending requests still in-flight, preventing violations before they occur. * Conversational Access Requests: A new AI-powered agent allows users to make access requests in natural language directly from their chat tools. With support for custom forms, employees can provide necessary business justifications and compliance details seamlessly within the chat flow. No customer left behind: IdentityIQ 9.0 For customers with extensive data residency requirements, strict regulatory constraints, or deeply customized programs, SailPoint is delivering IdentityIQ 9.0. The release provides a parallel modernization path for hybrid and on-premises deployments, centered on three pillars: a stronger governance, including granular, time-based access for roles and entitlements, and a rebuilt technical foundation running on modern application servers, with a refreshed user experience that streamlines access reviews and application definition. Critically, SailPoint is also offering an automated upgrade tool with the release. This utility scans a customer's environment and automates much of the manual work required to update, addressing the primary risk that stalls on-premises upgrades and proving that customers can confidently evolve their existing deployments.

SailPoint adds cloud identity tools & IdentityIQ 9.0. Wed, 7th Oct 2026 (Today) SailPoint has introduced updates to its cloud identity security platform and released IdentityIQ 9.0 for on-premises deployments, extending its product changes across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. The update covers SailPoint Human Fabric, the company's cloud-native offering, and IdentityIQ, its on-premises identity governance product. The changes target organisations whose identity systems must support larger access review workloads, tighter governance controls and more complex operating environments. In the cloud platform, SailPoint outlined three additions: a rebuilt access certification engine for large-scale access reviews, a separation-of-duties function that evaluates conflicts at the point of access request, and a conversational access request tool that lets staff request access through chat interfaces using natural language. The certification changes are intended to remove the need for administrators to break large review campaigns into smaller parts. The updated engine is designed to process access reviews without record limits or delays in data handling, while also adding cryptographic sign-off features for regulated sectors that require GxP compliance. The separation-of-duties update shifts checks earlier in the process. Instead of identifying problematic combinations of access after approval, the system evaluates requests in real time and can flag conflicts created not only by existing access but also by other requests still waiting to be processed. The third cloud update introduces an artificial intelligence agent for access requests inside workplace chat tools. Users can submit requests in natural language and complete custom forms within the same interaction, including business justification and compliance information. On-premises path Alongside the cloud changes, SailPoint released IdentityIQ 9.0 for customers that continue to run identity governance tools in their own environments or in hybrid settings. Those users often face data residency rules, regulatory constraints or heavy customisation that make a full move to the cloud less practical. IdentityIQ 9.0 focuses on governance changes, infrastructure updates and a revised user interface. The release adds more granular and time-based controls for roles and entitlements, runs on modern application servers, and streamlines access reviews and application definition. The release also includes an automated upgrade tool. SailPoint said the utility scans a customer environment and automates much of the work involved in updating older installations, addressing a common obstacle for organisations that delay upgrades because of the operational risk and manual effort involved. Chandra Gnanasambandam, Executive Vice President of Product and Chief Technology Officer at SailPoint, linked the dual release to different customer needs across deployment models. "Most vendors ask their customers to choose between a growth story or a stewardship story, but the reality of the modern enterprise is not that simple. Today, we are delivering on both fronts. We are advancing the frontier of cloud identity security with Human Fabric while also demonstrating our commitment to the customers who rely on IdentityIQ for identity security. This is one modernisation effort on two fronts, ensuring every customer has a path forward without compromise," said Gnanasambandam. Broader market The announcement reflects a continuing split in the identity security market between companies adopting cloud-based systems and those maintaining a mix of older and newer infrastructure. Many large organisations still run long-established governance platforms that are heavily integrated with internal systems, making migration slower and more complex than in other software categories. That has left suppliers under pressure to update cloud products without abandoning customers that remain on-premises for operational or regulatory reasons. SailPoint's latest release suggests it is trying to serve both groups at the same time, while also framing governance and scale as central issues for large enterprise customers. Identity governance tools have taken on a broader role as companies manage not just employee access but also temporary access, role-based permissions and compliance reporting across multiple systems. In that context, functions such as real-time separation-of-duties controls and large-scale certification reviews address practical governance tasks that often become harder to manage as organisations expand. SailPoint did not disclose pricing or customer deployment figures alongside the product announcements. The company said the changes are part of a wider effort to update its identity platform across both cloud and on-premises products. SailPoint described the automated upgrade utility in IdentityIQ 9.0 as a way to reduce the manual work that has often stalled upgrades for customers with complex existing deployments.

In the AI era, identity evolves into the control plane for trust. Every major security shift ultimately comes down to one question: Who or what is allowed to do this? For most of the past two decades, the answer was a person with a username and password. In the artificial intelligence era, the answer increasingly is an agent, and most organizations have no idea how many agents they have, what they can reach, or who is responsible for them. This is the primary reason identity has become a critical, and some would argue the most important, layer in the AI security stack. Reflecting this, the theme of this year's SailPoint Technologies Inc.'s Navigate conference is "AI, secured," which I will be attending on October 5-8 in Austin, TX. The identity math has changed. A tremendous amount of data supports the identity thesis. As an example, Palo Alto Networks Inc.'s 2026 Identity Security Landscape report found that organizations now manage an average of 109 machine identities for every human identity, and companies expect AI agent identities to grow 85% over the next 12 months. The same research found that more than half of organizations can't consistently enforce least-privilege access for service accounts across cloud, software-as-a-service and on-premises systems. SailPoint's own research is equally telling: Some 97% of AI agents have access to sensitive data, yet only 21% of organizations are highly confident they can manage AI agent security risks. Put those together, and you have an exploding population of highly privileged identities that almost nobody is governing well. It's important to note that the risk is real today. On SailPoint's most recent earnings call, management described a proof-of-concept at a Fortune 500 company that uncovered more than 10,000 previously unknown AI agents and thousands of related risks. Shadow IT took years to spread, while shadow agents are spreading in months. A recent ZK Research data point found that almost half of AI use is on mobile devices, most of which information technology can't see. As has been the case with every tech transition, if users do not get the experience they want from work tools, they will turn to consumer applications, and that's happening today with AI. Why identity, and why now. Much of the industry's work on agent security has focused on containment: sandboxes, secure runtimes, guardrails, and, increasingly, hardware enforcement. That work is essential, but it doesn't answer the most basic governance questions. A sandbox can prevent an agent from reaching the internet, but it can't tell you who created that agent, whose authority it's acting under, or whether it should still exist. For that, even the most sophisticated runtime must rely on an identity system. In other words, every layer of agent security depends on the enterprise getting identity right. Containment tells you what an agent can't do. Identity tells you who the agent is, who owns it, what it's entitled to, and when that entitlement should end. You need both, but identity is the system of record everything else relies on. Identity matters more for agents than it ever did for people for three reasons. First, agents operate at machine speed. A human with excessive privileges might misuse them occasionally. An agent with excessive privileges can exercise them thousands of times an hour, and as the Hugging Face incident this summer showed, it can find paths no one anticipated. Second, agents accumulate access. People change roles but retain permissions they no longer need; that's a longstanding identity problem. Agents do the same thing faster, spawning sub-agents, borrowing credentials and combining permissions in ways no single policy anticipated. Third, agents undermine accountability. When something goes wrong with a human account, there's a person to call. With agents, the owner is often unclear, credentials are shared, and the logs point to a service account nobody remembers creating. SailPoint Chief Executive Mark McClain explained on the earnings call that enterprises need to know what data each agent can access, which human is accountable for that access, and how to revoke it when necessary. Those are the right three questions, and most companies can't answer any of them today. SailPoint's bet on unified identity. SailPoint has leaned hard into this problem. In May, it launched Agentic Fabric, which discovers AI agents and machine identities, maps each to a human owner, and enforces real-time authorization. It became GA in August as part of a broader SailPoint Identity Security solution that pairs it with Human Fabric, the evolution of its Identity Security Cloud, on the Atlas platform. Capabilities include endpoint and browser sensors that expose hidden agents, Model Context Protocol servers, inline redaction of personal data before it reaches large language models, and a centralized kill switch for rogue agents. I met with SailPoint President Matt Mills at BlackHat, and SiliconANGLE Media Inc. discussed the product's importance. He explained, "You cannot secure what you cannot see, or what you cannot tie back to accountability." It's the latter part of his statement that's most important, because visibility without ownership just creates a longer list of problems. What to watch at SailPoint Navigate. SailPoint Navigate is coming up next week, and here's what I'll be looking for: * Proof in production. Agentic Fabric has been generally available for about two months. I want to hear from customers about how many agents they found, how they assigned ownership and what they shut down. * Interoperability with the agent stack. Identity has to integrate with runtimes such as OpenShell, cloud agent platforms and developer tools. SailPoint's recent Cursor connector is a good start, but the ecosystem should expand. * Just-in-time access for agents. Standing privilege is the enemy. I'll be watching how far SailPoint pushes toward zero standing privilege for nonhuman identities. * Speed of governance. Quarterly access reviews don't work for identities created and destroyed in minutes. Governance has to become continuous and largely automated. Recommendations for IT pros. Regardless of which vendor an organization chooses to use, this is where the focus for identity should be: * Inventory every agent. You can't govern what you can't see. Run discovery across cloud, software-as-a-service, endpoints and browsers, and expect the number to be much higher than you think. * Assign a human owner to every agent. No agent should exist without a named person accountable for it. Disable unowned agents by default. * Eliminate standing privileges. Move agents to just-in-time, scoped access that expires when the task is complete. Never embed long-lived keys or tokens in agent code. * Govern humans and machines together. Agents often act on people's behalf. Managing them in separate tools creates blind spots, so bring human, machine and agent identities into a single governance model. * Build and test a kill switch. Know exactly how you would revoke an agent's access and credentials in seconds and practice it before you need to. * Connect identity to enforcement. Ensure your identity platform feeds your agent runtimes, network controls and security operations tools so policy is enforced wherever the agent goes. Final thoughts. The industry has spent the past few years debating whether AI is safe, and that discussion has reached a crescendo over the past couple of months. The more practical question for IT leaders is whether they know who and what is operating within their environment. Identity has always been foundational to security, but in the AI era it becomes the control plane for trust. Companies that treat agents as first-class identities can scale AI with confidence. Those that don't will eventually learn the hard way what their agents have been doing. Navigate should give SiliconANGLE Media Inc. a good read on how ready the industry and SailPoint are for that shift. Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. Photo: SailPoint. 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