Looking Back and Ahead: One Identity & KuppingerCole in Conversation

Welcome. I'm here with Praveet of One Identity, the new CEO.

Welcome, Praveet. Thank you, Martin. Thanks for having me. I think we met recently already and had a bit of a conversation when you entered your new role. And it was interesting because we ended up with having a lot of commonalities in our past. So with you being at Microsoft, I, which not many people know, I've been a freelance promoter when studying at the first land management booth of Microsoft at a CBIT fair in Germany, and then following Windows NT and the Active Directory from basically more or less day one. So maybe you talk a bit about your own history in the industry. Absolutely.

Thanks, Martin. Yeah, like we talked about, I've been sort of doing this for 30 years. I've been a software professional now for 30 years. I started my career back at Microsoft in 1995 on what became the Active Directory when we launched with Windows 2000.

And so, yeah, it's kind of interesting to go back. When I originally started, we had NT351 release that was the land manager days. And you and I could sort of connect back to literally 30 years ago and sort of using the similar stuff. Yeah.

For me, coming back. Yeah, go ahead. And still some of that stuff is around at the end of the day, at least technology-wise, there are things which still exist. I remember I've been a bit ago, I've been talking to a CISO when we touched the OT security and he said he would be lucky if he only had the NTLM protocol to deal with. But he said, I even have the LM protocol in my OT environment. So the operational technology. Wow. Wow. Yes.

I mean, you and I were sort of joking about this, right? That the security properties dialogue in the file explorer and in Active Directory is still the dialogue that I designed back in the late 90s.

So yeah, technology sort of, even though we have come such a long way, there are some things that are still the same, right? Yeah. It's fun to be back in the identity space. It's kind of, for me, I feel like I've made a full circle starting my career, being on the Active Directory team, building things like Kerberos and PKI infrastructure and the access control model, spending time at AWS, running a lot of their identity and security infrastructure teams over there to then come as CEO of an identity where I've come a full circle in that regard. Yeah.

And you help right now organizations to manage the access controls on their still existing Windows file servers, where they don't see the dialogue you've created almost three decades ago. So at the end of the day, it's really closing the circle here. Totally. Totally feels that way. I actually also say to people that in some ways coming to one identity is like finishing the job. Some of the things that I couldn't do when I was sort of on the Active Directory team, right?

Like the full lifecycle management of identity from the point an employee is hired into the organization, into the HR system, you're managing their access, their full identity governance, right? Across the application suite. And then even the employee leads sort of cleaning up and the attestation work around that, or the privilege elevation capabilities that we offer with safeguards. So it's like we're doing like at one identity, we're doing all the things that augment on top of the core directory capabilities. And so it's sort of finishing the job. Yeah.

And that's really great because it means you're very experienced, seasoned professional in this industry right now in a CEO role. And I dare to say you really understand what you're dealing with. So you also are working with us as an analyst firm. So what is it, why you do it?

Well, Martin, you've built quite a practice. I have to say, I think, you might remember Burton Group back in the 90s and early 2000s, Burton Group was sort of this firm like yours, which was just specialized in the identity space, right? And when Burton Group sort of got acquired by Gartner, there was really a gap created. And I think you've gone and created Carpenter Coal as a specialist analyst firm in this fairly complex and critical space for organizations. And I have a lot of respect.

I mean, you've done an incredible job. The firm is so well respected in the world now as an expert in this space, right? I think customers need your expertise. So that's why I think our partnership, and I've only learned coming back into the space at One Identity, like how critical of a role you play and your team plays in helping us and customers to be successful in this space. Yeah. And the market didn't become sort of easier to handle. We see a lot of new emerging technologies. The number of vendors has grown massively.

I remember back when we started, someone said, why don't you do something for whatever 50 or 80 companies out there? Right now, we have significantly more. We have very, very well-settled, large players like One Identity, and also still a lot of evolution and movement in the market. And I think, yes, it definitely didn't become simpler to navigate through that world than it was whatever, two or three decades ago. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's gotten more complex and it has gotten more critical, right? One of the evolutions that has happened is I sort of say that as more and more organizations have moved into the cloud and have adopted SaaS applications, right? The network perimeter has essentially evaporated, right? There isn't a network. No organization can sort of just say, oh, I can put a network firewall and I can protect myself. Identity has become the security perimeter, right?

Like when you look at the attack vectors now, phishing and sphere phishing, the identity is the target now, especially privileged accounts have become that target where that's how attackers are trying to get inside the networks and inside customer environments and breach. So I think your role has become even more critical.

And we, as one of the vendors, are playing an important part of helping customers be protected. But you looking at the industry and helping customers look at all the options they have, it's a critical role. Yeah. And I think one of the things we try really to do is also to educate about more strategies on how do you, what to do and how do you do it right? Because I think one of the challenges every customer or less has except a few newborn organizations is that you don't never act in a green field. You always have some legacy and you need to navigate.

And the simple answer of rip and replace never works well. I think it's usually how can you evolve from here and also build on all the experience and learnings when the spring was. And I think this is a very important thing in a fast evolving market where at the end of the day, still it's, you need a rock solid foundation in IGA and access and PAM to succeed in your cyber security posture.

Yeah, Martin, I just flew back from London over the weekend and met with one of our largest customers there. And it was actually quite humbling, Martin. They have hundreds of Microsoft Active Directories that they need to protect. They have thousands of Unix and Windows systems in their environment and all of them have these privileged accounts. So they're a safeguard customer and they are kind of moving all those accounts onto safeguard because they want to kind of control access to these privileged accounts, like the root credentials or the domain admin credentials.

And, you know, in their environment, they keep finding more things that they need to protect, right? And each one of these can become a vector into the environment. Yeah. And if you don't do your homework, your baseline security, your hygiene, all that stuff well, then you fail. I think that's the point. I think it's important then to look at what is going on, how are things evolving. And I know your flagship product, One Identity Manager, I know it for decades, way before the company was acquired by One Identity.

And it has evolved over the decades with the needs in the market, but there's still a substantial area of things that always remain the same. We started with the file dialogue and at the end of the day, it is that there are things which just don't disappear and you need to do this as good as you do the modern stuff. Very true. Very true. All right. Anything you'd like to add before we close?

No, I think, again, thank you for giving time to me, Martin. I'm looking forward to partnering with you as I kind of settle in this role. And I think your guidance is going to be key to how we continue to succeed and serve our customers. So really appreciate it, Martin.

Thank you, Berit, for taking the time. Pleasure always to talk to you, especially because both of us are definitely amongst the veterans in the industry.

Yes, we're definitely the veterans. Thank you. Thank you.