Two Steps Forward: A Momentous Time for SailPoint with the Acquisition of Intello

If you hopped into a time machine and followed SailPoint’s journey in the last 15 years, you’ll see that our approach to innovation has been integral in how we’ve constantly evolved identity security. Our goal is to meet and exceed our customers’ pressing identity needs year after year. It’s one of the main things that drew me to SailPoint when I joined the team last spring. We are innovators, and SailPoint seems to be redefining identity security at each phase of growth.

Unsurprisingly, we’re at it again, kicking off 2021 with an important acquisition that speeds our ability to innovate, addressing a very important area of looming risk for today’s enterprise: the rapid growth of SaaS applications, the way they connect to company data, and the fact that they often grow up outside of the traditional IT organization. The company is called Intello, and they have developed a SaaS management platform that helps organizations discover and manage all their SaaS apps, uncovering the Shadow IT that is currently outside of IT’s purview.

This acquisition is critical for many reasons. The first reason is that it is estimated that by 2022 nearly 90% of organizations will rely almost entirely on SaaS apps to run their business. How do you protect all of that if you can’t see where it exists or who has access? With Intello embedded into our SailPoint Identity Platform, we will help organizations to discover all these SaaS apps and then manage access to them, just like they already do for their other critical apps and systems. We are here to enable our customers to run, not force them to walk as they pivot to the demands of doing business in the modern world.

But I digress, in a nutshell, here’s why this is important for our customers today and in the future.

It is a growing trend that companies lack visibility into what SaaS apps exist across the business and who or what has access to them. Today’s workforce is much more SaaS-centric than it was even a year ago, and by all accounts, this will continue to trend upward. While the digital transformation has been years in the making for many organizations, COVID-19 and the global pivot to virtual working has sped up the transformation at lightning speed. I recently spoke with a CISO who told me that they rapidly deployed over a dozen apps when their offices shut down, and they were now feeling the effects of “SaaS bloat.”

This shift to remote has compelled many workers, in their quest to work smarter and faster, to download and use unsanctioned SaaS apps at a record pace with no oversight by IT (this is the Shadow IT or the Shadow Access I mentioned earlier).

Now that you have the lay of the land, all this has contributed to an ungoverned and unprotected SaaS universe and represents a new area of exposure: the growing lack of visibility into who has access to what SaaS apps (and the data within). In this new era in IT, the only way to fully protect today’s cloud enterprise is by first discovering all of these hidden SaaS applications and then applying the very same governance controls that are already in place for the rest of their critical business applications.

We accomplish this with Intello.

Through this acquisition, SailPoint will help organizations shine an identity security light on their ungoverned SaaS apps and then extend the right security, governance, and cost controls to those apps. I’ve been so impressed—and a little scared—to see the gaps that Intello has unearthed for its customers: unauthorized email plugins that have the ability to read and send company email, unfamiliar plugins for messaging platforms that can read messages, or unused access that presents a security risk—as well as costing the company tens of thousands of dollars a month!

Like in the last decade, this latest move shows SailPoint’s commitment to securely enabling the digital enterprise and the demands they face in order to scale. As we step into 2021, we will continue to strengthen our cloud governance offering to help them accomplish just that, which sets us apart as the leader in the industry. Another two steps ahead in our marathon to helping organizations stay secure now and, in the future, whatever comes their way. We’re here for our customers every step of the way.