Summary
There is a fundamental architectural shift occurring within enterprise cybersecurity. As the adoption of agentic frameworks accelerates and unlocks new operational efficiencies, human-centric security models are no longer adequate. Instead, identity-centric considerations that balance human and agent coexistence are required to enable trust, authority, governance, and control. This is a complex endeavor, further complicated by fragmented identity security solutions built by infrastructure providers that focus on their respective strengths across identity and privileged access management, identity threat detection and response, and identity governance and administration. However, identity security is quickly becoming unified within platforms that offer an end-to-end methodology to manage safe, secure access and authoritative actions for both humans and delegated non-human agents.
Identity has historically been a primary target for attackers. This trend will continue, and breaches are expected to escalate exponentially through new, highly automated attacks on agent-based AI infrastructure that fails to maintain proper machine identity hygiene. As agents grow and gain the ability to autonomously access data, execute API calls and applications, write code, and invoke other agents, identity is emerging as a critical control plane within the agentic enterprise.
LoneStar Advisory & Research believes SailPoint is reimagining human and agentic security, delivering exceptional operational outcomes by leveraging the strengths of its Atlas foundation and deploying its Human Fabric and Agentic Fabric, which together address the pitfalls of safeguarding agentic AI. This research note will provide insights into how identity serves as the first line of human and agentic defense, the power of SailPoint’s multi-security fabric approach, and how the company is leaning into its depth in IGA to broaden its solution development efforts to address identity fragmentation and deliver a complete solution.
The First Line Of Human And Agentic Defense
A compelling argument can be made that identity security is quickly becoming the first line of human and agentic defense. Historically, the lion’s share of breaches and data exfiltration incidents resulted directly from compromised credentials. This alarming statistic triggered the creation of a bevy of identity point solutions from cybersecurity vendors, each tending to focus on diverse ways to solve the problem with a common theme of zero-trust, least-privileged access. Unfortunately, this created a fragmented, often confusing array of offerings, requiring bespoke integrations to stitch together a complete solution. The rise of platformization is addressing the fragmentation, but more is needed.
Today, the growing adoption of agentic AI is making enterprise infrastructure more resilient, but it is also creating challenges in managing the escalating scale of agents. In SailPoint’s most recent Year of the Agent Report, it states that AI agents now outnumber the humans overseeing them, and 91% of organizations are already deploying or evaluating them. However, only 21% feel confident they can manage the security risks that come with this shift. Adding to these concerns, RSA reports that 69% of organizations reported a breach tied to inadequate identity security capabilities, and 45% said an identity breach cost them more than $10 million.
Given these alarming trends across enterprises, identity security can serve as the first line of defense against the weaponization of AI. Frontier AI is quickly changing the SecOps playbook, allowing bad actors to scan large codebases in minutes, identify vulnerabilities, and fully automate attack campaigns and target credential weaknesses. SailPoint understands these challenges, and its well-defined agentic identity security principles, which include immutable agent birthright ownership, a real-time agent ledger, continuous agent risk evaluation, real-time agent authorization, cryptographic verification, and the establishment of an agent moral code, are what is required given today’s threat landscape. These architectural tenets strengthen SailPoint’s multi-fabric security strategy with its Agentic Fabric and Human Fabric.
Two Fabrics – One Powerful Identity Security Solution
Fabrics are experiencing a technology renaissance. Once reserved for simplifying connectivity, today’s fabrics are serving as a distributed control and enforcement architecture for converged networking and security services. This matters because agents do not behave like traditional endpoints. They obtain credentials, make API calls, access data, write code, modify infrastructure, and execute actions autonomously. Consequently, fabrics are quickly evolving to comprehend the need for continuous policy enforcement across agents and humans. SailPoint’s approach deploys two fabrics that provide hardened identity security for both agents and humans, offering deployment flexibility based on enterprises’ identity security maturity.
First, SailPoint’s Agentic Fabric aims to provide a unified, intelligent architecture designed to eliminate operational silos and provide deep visibility and robust governance for both agents and humans. It is designed to simplify management complexity, automate cumbersome manual tasks, including user lifecycle workflows and governance policies, and serve as the single source of truth as an authoritative control plane. Diving deeper, SailPoint Agentic Fabric provides granular visibility through the continuous, automated discovery of all agents and non-human identities across an IT estate, while comprehending deep organizational context. It maps agents to human owners, machine credentials, entitlements, and sensitive data to eliminate blind spots and understand data access paths. It also provides strong governance and auditability by treating agents as first-class identities within all SailPoint services. It does this by enforcing clear human ownership and accountability and providing robust audit trails and compliance reporting for agent activity. Furthermore, SailPoint’s Agentic Fabric enables proactive, machine-speed defense against agent-based threats by continuously monitoring behavior for anomalies and policy violations and dynamically applying remediation to contain threats, such as revoking entitlements or disabling agents. SailPoint’s centralized agentic control plane also offers additional benefits, including inline prompt security to safeguard PII, contextual inspection to block unsanctioned behavior, and a centralized kill switch to disable rogue agents.
Second, SailPoint’s recently announced Human Fabric, evolved from the company’s significant investment in its Identity Security Cloud, is designed to transform static identity governance into a continuous, real-time posture management solution. It detects hidden privilege creep, informs SOC workflows with real-time identity context, and provides just-in-time access for the precise duration of an agentic task. It does this by enabling real-time governance that replaces historically manual point-in-time reviews, enforcing zero trust principles to reduce risky access, and continuously detecting and remediating identity threats before compromise. SailPoint Human Fabric’s strength is that it flips the polarity from reactive to proactive access control, dynamically adapting to an organization’s present and future security needs and eliminating manual intervention prone to error.
Together, SailPoint’s Human and Agentic Fabrics function as a force multiplier, delivering one identity security solution powered by the company’s Atlas intelligence layer, which normalizes identity, entitlement, and risk data and unifies governance under a single control plane for humans, machines, and agents. These capabilities provide comprehensive visibility across all identity types, mapping complex relationships between human owners, non-human identities, entitlements, and sensitive data to eliminate blind spots. It also enforces least privilege access from creation to retirement for both human and agent identities, delivering proactive protection and real-time response through continuous monitoring, dynamic risk scoring, and automated remediation workflows that operate at machine speed. Together, this functionality enables organizations to innovate with AI confidently while transforming identity from a vulnerability into a powerful security advantage.
Final Thoughts
LoneStar Advisory & Research believes that SailPoint’s identity security architectural framework is complete, encompassing discovery, governance, and protection to keep pace with adversaries moving attack campaigns from AI-assisted to fully automated ones at machine speed.
For many years, identity security was treated as a second-class citizen in cybersecurity – a necessary control point that often created friction with multi-year deployment cycles, as evidenced by SailPoint’s annual Horizons identity security maturity research. However, identity security is quickly emerging as a critical control plane for agentic AI, and SailPoint is meeting enterprise demand with a multi-fabric approach that provides deployment flexibility. Additionally, SailPoint’s Agentic Acceleration is unique and powerful, potentially compressing mean time to optimized identity security outcomes from months and years to hours, enhanced by the recent introduction of a color-coded set of agents that help move from standing privilege to a fully autonomous identity security framework.
SailPoint is delivering a powerful set of capabilities that do not rely solely on agent kill switches to address rogue agents. Instead, it is addressing the root cause of weak observability, poor governance, and lackluster protection to reimagine human and agentic identity security.
