How ConductorOne’s Copilot Improves Identity Governance with AI

Identity governance is table stakes for shutting down insider attacks and reducing the risks of a catastrophic breach. Getting identity governance right also helps eliminate compliance-related fines and audits – a win for any CISO or CIO managing identity sprawl today. 

Managing user and machine identities in multi-cloud environments is among their teams’ most challenging tasks. The most challenging areas of managing identities in a multi-cloud environment include getting permissions right while eliminating orphan accounts, monitoring access privileges and reducing the risk of stolen privilege access credentials.

Controlling identities, controlling the company

Attackers know that if they can gain control of the identities of a business, they can shut it down. According to multiple CISOs who were not authorized to speak on the record, there are often too many identity alerts to manage from multiple legacy systems. Their Security Operations Centers (SOC) teams deal with data overload and need a more streamlined approach to manage and complete tickets. What’s needed is more real-time views of identity governance and the ability to get more work done in less time using real-time workflows from JIRA and other ticket-backed systems.  

ConductorOne’s founder and CEO, Alex Bovee, and his team know these challenges well. His company is a leader in providing identity governance, least privileged access and access management to organizations globally. 

“Identity is messy, and access management is hard. Legacy identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions never solved these challenges. The missing element is context, detailed risk analysis across all your identity data and better automation. ConductorOne Copilot does just that –– it provides recommendations and automation that streamline your business and keep you more secure,” Bovee said during a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Gartner notes that many IGA vendors “aren’t positioned for the continuous and context-aware controls needed to establish ‘identity-first’ strategies due to the dependence on inflexible policies and static workflows.” Bovee and his team often see this with their enterprise customers. Helping their customers overcome this and other barriers led them to fast-track the development of the Conductor Copilot. 

How ConductorOne is using AI to improve identity governance

AI assistants must be designed to learn from human interactions so their models are fine-tuned and have enough data to provide personalized experiences to different users. VentureBeat’s observation is that having AI assistant workflows designed to keep learning based on human insight is essential for their accuracy. 

“With AI recommendations, human-in-the-loop approvers have the right context to make access decisions. Copilot also drives efficiency by giving your workforce a seamless access management experience, for example by automating provisioning and approvals flows through helpdesk ticketing systems,” Bovee told VentureBeat.

One of the most challenging aspects of applying AI-based decision-making to identity governance is the limited amount of contextual data that is often available. ConductorOne’s Copilot factored this into their product design by providing risk-based recommendations to guide approvers, using insights across all identity and access data. 

Bovee said, “With AI recommendations, human-in-the-loop approvers have the right context to make access decisions. Copilot also drives efficiency by giving your workforce a seamless access management experience, for example by automating provisioning and approvals flows through helpdesk ticketing systems.” Users submit a request through your existing ticketing system, such as JIRA. Copilot will automatically action the request through the ConductorOne platform, providing automated approval routing, provisioning, and a complete audit trail. 

ConductorOne Copilot integrates into Jira to automate access request processes. Source: ConductorOne 

The goal: improve security without slowing productivity down 

According to Gartner, security and risk management teams and the CISOs leading them are impatient to get more value out of their IGA systems.  One of the most common barriers they face is improving identity governance without slowing down productivity. Bovee and the ConductorOne team saw the barrier as an opportunity to help their current and prospective customers become more efficient at identity governance without sacrificing productivity.

According to multiple CISOs who were not authorized to speak on the record, a more responsive IGA system is needed to anticipate what SOC analysts need before they ask for it. That’s why having a human-in-the-loop design for any AI-enabled copilot is critical. ConductorOne’s Copilot is designed to constantly learn and provide AI-generated recommendations based on risk flags, contextual insights, and detailed real-time analysis across all identity data. As the first AI assistant for identity governance, ConductorOne’s Copilot reflects AI’s potential to take on the most challenging areas of cybersecurity, starting with identity governance by delivering much-needed contextual insight and scale.