SailPoint's McClain: Secure AI agents at machine speed

SailPoint's annual Navigate conference in Austin, Texas, brought together its executives and outside experts to argue that the old perimeter defense model no longer holds. The company's founder and CEO, Mark McClain, explained that its technical team concluded it could not secure agent identities effectively in what he called admin time, and that the company instead has to be in the real-time decision-making cycle of judging whether an agent with its context and intent is doing what is expected.

The event leaned heavily on concrete discovery findings. SailPoint's chief customer officer, Meredith Blanchar, described a Fortune 500 company that insisted it had no agents until discovery turned up 10,000, many with standing admin privileges. Jeff Hickman, senior VP of sales engineering, said production proofs of concept find orphaned or overprivileged access within hours every time, and in one case risk scoring narrowed 100,000 non-human identities down to 72 that needed attention. Half of discovered agents still lack a known owner, according to theCUBE Research's Krista Case and co-host Rebecca Knight.

SailPoint is responding with products and partnerships. Its June acquisition of Entro Security added about 1,200 discovery sources for non-human identities, and Entro's co-founder and CEO, Itzik Alvas, said the latest AI-driven attacks all come down to an exposed credential that an agent found and used to log in. On the cloud side, Madhu Parthasarathy, general manager of Bedrock AgentCore at Amazon Web Services, said tasks on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore grew 15 times over in the first six months of the year, with a new agent created every 4.5 seconds. Whether enterprises can keep up may depend on getting auditors and regulators comfortable, which Matt Mills, SailPoint's president, identified as the main obstacle to letting AI fix problems on its own.