Q&A explores platform’s new developer community

Q: The past twelve months have been turbulent for all sectors. What has the effect been in the cyber security industry?  

A: The global pandemic turned the world upside down with a new normal. Just look at the digital transformation. What might have taken five to ten years before COVID-19 is happening right now in the blink of an eye. With many of us working remotely, technology-driven transformation is now front and centre, driving an exponential proliferation of cloud applications as well as cyber risk.

I don't think anyone will argue that in order to maintain a secure infrastructure, it is essential to ensure that access is appropriate for each person based on their role and job duties. However, with ever-increasing workloads and the number of applications we all have to work within simultaneously, workers just want to focus on getting the job done. In contrast, IT and security teams want to ensure that work is done securely.  

On top of that, workers don't want to spend time on tedious manual work, like creating and submitting help desk tickets and having to enter data into a bunch of fields. We all have a limited number of hours in a day and are trying to be as productive as possible.   

Q: SailPoint has recently announced it has made its platform more extensible. What does this mean in practice?  

A: SailPoint is taking a huge step towards helping organisations automate and infuse identity security into their critical business processes so workers can simply focus on what they do best, while also ensuring it's done securely and compliant to policy. We are doing this by opening up our SaaS platform and extending our core identity security capabilities via APIs and event triggers. This allows us to quickly build automated low/no-code integrations, solutions, and workflows to meet organisations’ needs.   

For example, suppose a business has an employee who just started and needs a badge and laptop provisioned as soon as possible. Traditionally, this would have been a manual process requiring IT to submit a ticket to provision a badge and a laptop to the newly hired employee. This process can now be automated along with the provisioning of access for this person's new role - saving a lot of IT time and cost and ensuring worker productivity on day one.

Using SailPoint identity security, organisations can proactively monitor for risky access behaviour, such as an account accessing the same app from different locations within minutes. With SailPoint, once these nefarious activities are detected, it can be automatically logged into your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution so security analysts can get rapid visibility and take action.

Q: How is this playing into the wider IT and business priorities of SailPoint’s customers?

A: SailPoint's extensible identity platform provides the foundation to create a connected, adaptable cloud environment. This allows you to create custom, tailored solutions to fit your specific business needs and enable you to quickly adapt and react to today's uncertain threat landscape.  

One thing you can count on is that we're continually looking for ways to simplify and enhance the customer experience when interacting with our products. It's important to us that we help our customers maximise productivity and increase operational efficiency. With our identity platform's extensible capabilities, the sky's the limit in terms of what customers can achieve with our proven identity security platform.   

Q: What is next for SailPoint’s SaaS offering?

A: This is just the beginning; we will continue to advance our platform features. The newly launched SailPoint Developer Community shows our commitment to this effort by providing customers with the best developer experience possible. We will be rolling out libraries, sample code, and applications to help businesses leverage and integrate to SailPoint and build world-class solutions.

Our customers and partner ecosystem are at the centre of how we innovate as we continue to collaborate and share products and apps built on our platform. We are thrilled to go on this journey with organisations today as we explore together the limits of what's truly possible. Here's to 2021.