Accelerate your Identity's Digital Transformation

Welcome to this videocast with Clear Skye. I'm Martin Kuppinger, principal analyst KuppingerCole and I'm here with Jackson and TJ from Clear Skye.

Welcome, Jackson and welcome, TJ. Thank you, Martin. Introduce yourself. Sure. My name is Jackson Shaw. I'm the chief strategy officer at clear sky. I've been involved in identity governance and administration for about 28, almost 30 years now. And I've been involved in ServiceNow for just coming on to nine months. So brand new experience for me.

Okay, TJ, what about you? Absolutely. So my name is TJ Gryziec, I'm the chief product officer and one of the founders here at clear sky. Unlike Jackson, I didn't start with an identity background. I come from the service management side, the ServiceNow side of the world, working in the it departments and, and really focusing on workflow and experience. So it's been exciting to work with Jackson.

Okay, great. You you're coming with to your appear on your a one-year funding anniversary. So could you tell me a little bit about the Charney and, and how things could have gone so far? Absolutely.

You know, like I mentioned, coming from a background of service management, you often see the problem of identity from the help desk perspective. You see the tickets that are coming in, the work that needs to be completed. And I would say that, you know, originally the first four years of the company were focused on solving those problems since funding, about a year ago, we've expanded the team quite a bit and filled out with many experts in the identity space Jackson included.

And I think our worldview is opened up quite a bit from just, you know, provisioning tickets, that sort of thing with, from an efficiency play. And it's been an exciting journey so far. Yeah. Checks on you being an identity management veteran in some way. What is your, how has your journey been?

Well, it, I mean, for me, it's been, it's been really interesting, you know, the whole, the whole marriage of its salmon and identity is something I didn't really think about. But over the last few years, I've heard more and more customers ask about integration with an ITM system and in particular ServiceNow because of its popularity. And as I got more and more involved with TJ and John and Vaughn around service, now it really amazed me what this platform could do.

It just completely blew me away about how, you know, the whole raison d'etre of ServiceNow is, is digital workflows and automating the processes behind, you know, various different tasks. And when you really think about identity governance, or you think about identity management, it is a whole series of automated tasks. So there's this kind of marriage of, you know, peanut butter and chocolate. That really makes sense with, with ServiceNow and identity governance. And it's just been a really incredible journey over the last 7, 8, 9 months.

So, so when, when do you look back to this year and checks the already set us, there were a lot of learnings for you and a teacher. You also mentioned your learnings from the other side. So what have you been your biggest learnings over these close months?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that my biggest learning in the whole thing is, is, you know, my understanding of identity and the coverage that identity usually served. I thought it was a much larger coverage. I thought a hundred percent of applications and access were being managed for modern enterprises. And the more we talked to organizations, the more we find out that they may cover their regulated applications.

They may cover the most critical access, but there's still hundreds, or even in some cases, thousands of points of access are being unmanaged or being managed through ticketing systems like TSM, or just shadow it in general, where you may have someone who's leading and sort of manages the keys to the kingdom there.

So that was, you know, I think a big shocker from my perspective, so, Well, you know, I've always had this belief for, you know, a lot of years now around how expensive identity projects have been, how difficult they are to manage and get completed and how, in some ways they were disjointed from the business process.

And I think in, in, in a lot of ways, what I've learned about ServiceNow is that people have bought this platform, this really, really powerful platform that allows them to do all these digital workflows, build all these processes for the company as part of their digital transformation. So it's really interesting to me that it enables an identity governance or an identity management solution that sits on top of this platform to be part of that overall digital transformation, that business process re-engineering, that's going on within an organization.

And to me, that's, that's really powerful. Yeah.

And, and, you know, when I look at it as an analyst, I think this is what aligns with what you were saying. So when you look at a standard IGA deployment, most fulfilled, most requests are manual. There's a lot of stuff which should run at best tickets through an it service management reality is that even that isn't as chief, but when you look at this, these changes you've are often, I'm also falling in as an analyst. So what do you think this means for, to the market as a whole? So what do you see changing in the overall market and then what, what do you expect to happen here?

Well, let, let me give you sort of a bit of a perspective on online and then maybe TJ can chat for a couple of seconds. You know, again, historically what I've seen is, and this was not me. This was customer saying, Hey, we need to integrate with our ITFM system. We need to integrate with ServiceNow. And the reason we need to do that is it's our, it's our last mile. It's our last mile of provisioning, all the things that have to be done manually, they're automated through the ITFM process, through the ticketing system.

And I think the, the amazing sort of, you know, recognition of that and building the, all the governance and the identity processes on top of that have really opened my eyes to, instead of, you know, calling ServiceNow the last mile provisioning, why don't we start right there and start the journey right? Where we want to be so to speak. And I think one of the most interesting things that I learned from TJ, he, he, he, you know, when I first started, he said, he said this amazing thing, which was ServiceNow stores the DNA of the organization.

And I kind of understood the words, but didn't really understand the meaning and, and number of months have gone by. And I, I certainly understand it now. And I don't know TJ, if you want to comment on that, but that was like a pretty important learning. Let me check, let me interrupt quickly here.

Is it, is it done that that's, from your perspective, service tasks in some way to shell around identity management, the way users should interact because identity and access management management tools, because it's what they are used to use. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think if you, if you actually talk to customers, which we're all supposed to do, right. And understand the drivers behind ServiceNow and understood and understand some of the, the things that are motivating, the changes that organizations are making today, it's all around a better user experience, a better employee experience, a better contractor experience and having everything look, look the same, feel the same, be automated the same way is super compelling for companies because it means that they can use service.

Now, train people to work between the business, the business, and the identity governance. It just, it's a really a match made in heaven. From that perspective, you don't have to worry about any of the performance or the dev ops around your cloud instance, because that's all handled by, by service.

Now, when you're using all the tools that are available on ServiceNow. So it's a great way to think of it from that we call it the shell.

No, absolutely. And I couldn't agree more. We're definitely seeing that. And I think that, you know, identity is being pulled along versus leading a lot of digital transformation today. We're seeing it almost every organization that we talked to. That's using ServiceNow who have already implemented components of ServiceNow, sorry of identity within the ServiceNow platform, you're seeing people submit access requests and manage approval.

And at the end of the day, a task may be generated or an automation activity may be generated that performs that activity in the same way that an IGA solution would an organizations and it departments and the ServiceNow teams are starting to lead these projects. You're seeing it the same in the identity life cycle components of things with HR onboarding, you know, once these processes leave the identity teams, the security teams and the responsibility falls on the departments like HR that are living within ServiceNow that are managing their processes within service.

Now it becomes a natural path. And so we're finding that whether the identity team or the security team are leading it, it's heading down that path already. People are already starting these projects. They're already starting to migrate identity processes onto the platform, whether they're calling it IGA or whether they're calling an access request. So the business is actually ahead of the IGA industry. I would say in many ways, because they're already trying to move to that better single experience.

The one point I liked, I think checks, you mentioned it very, very briefly more at the beginning is that you also see, and I think this is an important observation to this is growing beyond the sort of fulfillment and request use cases. We see integration to GRC processes, which are again, integrated as a ServiceNow platform. We see overall becoming bigger. So think about application onboarding, which is very much seeing a lot of manual fulfillment for sure. And all that goes into it, but out of areas.

So I understand you also see that this is so to speak, to standardize GA parts on trust, the starting point of the journey. Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, one of the key things about ServiceNow is as you call it, this application onboarding, TJ has done an incredible amount of work in the team around application onboarding and being able to, you know, centralize that again around around ServiceNow is, is critically important. But one of the other things which was a realization for me was this, this data.

I don't know if we call it a data plane or what the right term is, but within ServiceNow, all this data is stored in a data plane, obviously secured in the proper way. But the cool thing about it, you know, to your point about GRC and, and, you know, IGA is that with all of this information that ServiceNow has, they have their GRC module, their HR module, their dev ops and sec ops.

And, and of course what we bring to the table with the identity data is this common data plane that we can leverage across all these different modules. It, it really does provide, you know, a better experience, I think for the customers. And it reduces what we call at least in north America. I'm not sure if everybody would know this term, the swivel chair approach of, you know, calling the identity people to get them to do something or calling the security people and getting them to do something or calling the GRC people to figure something out. It's all in one spot.

I, I couldn't agree more. I think that you're starting to see a convergence in a single flow, right? Oftentimes these workloads are, are being done within silos across multiple, across multiple departments.

One of the benefits of being on a singular platform and having your identity data on that platform is there's a component of identity in every business process, whether it's from the time you start in HR and human resources and the changes that happen as you evolve in your organization, or whether it's in the compliance side of things, all of these things are being done manually today, whether it's HR handing off to identity, like you said, or whether it's the identity teams performing the reviews, and then having to feed that up to another solution or export data and a handle of this, this data across.

Whereas Ernie is the workflows where workflows are handing off to other workflows and each component and each department can have their own processes and take an intake from another process and being able to track and feel of this in single dashboard, or being able to track all of the components of an individual's identity beyond the access. We can start to look at things like the servers and computers. They're responsible for the vulnerabilities on those. And we can start to bring this data together and really paint a much better picture of exactly what this identity is. Okay.

So, so what does the future fourth, two years look like? Absolutely. I'll start Jackson. And then if, if you want to add in that, that sounds great. So I think from a clear sky perspective, we're working on several initiatives today. I think our big goals are really just to make things easier, make it easier for the developer, make it easier for the implementer, make it easier for the person who's going to be using this on a day-to-day basis and maintaining it.

One feature that we're really excited about and we've been working on for quite a while, is an application catalog or an access catalog. Not only being able to go to an access catalog because everyone has one of those, right? Every vendor out there today has one, but also being able to onboard applications and manage the governance in the same way that the iTunes store, the ServiceNow store does so that the identity teams can focus on the content and not the data entry and not the components that really should be managed by the application owners themselves.

So we're excited to see benefits not only on the way that users can request and search for access, but also how we enable the rest of the business to onboard their own applications into the service. Now platform onboard their own applications into ours, and then allow the identity folks to govern that process versus be the workers who have to feed it into the system and keep it up to date.

Well, what's exciting me at this point in time is the fact that I'm really starting to see customers pull in identity governance as part of a top line initiative at accompany. I mean, when you think about digital transformation and business transformation, it's driven by the board and, and downwards.

A lot of times I've been spending in the past fighting for identity projects that are below the line, so to speak, they're used to reduce expenses and these, this digital transformation business transformation that's happening right now is happening in a lot of cases without identity governance, without a doubt without identity management. So the fact that we're able to come in with ServiceNow and build on top of the ServiceNow platform that a lot of companies are using for this digital transformation, I think is, is pretty amazing.

And I'm really excited about that because you can see it in the customers when you talk to them and you hear their feedback about what they're going through and how we're going to help them. So I'm, I'm super excited about that. And I think at one last thing that's worth mentioning is just that the market isn't waiting for identity to be in its M it's not waiting for a vendor to tell them how to do it. They're already doing these things. They're not slowing their digital transformation down for us to catch up. And so we're trying to stay ahead of that also. So I think that's a good point.

So in a nutshell, you're looking at a bright future checks, TJ, thank you very much for all the information provided for all the insights you delivered. Thank you very much for joining this talk. Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. Pretty much.