Saviynt raises $205M and affirms that IAM must be cloud-friendly

Managing identities on-premises isn’t good enough. Today’s organizations need automated, cloud-friendly Identity Access Management (IAM) processes if they’re going to authenticate and authorize remote users at scale. In decentralized working environments, there’s a mandate for being agile.

One vendor looking to build an agile cloud IAM process is identity and access governance provider Saviynt, which today announced it has closed $205 million in growth financing from AB Private Credit Investors’ Tech Capital solutions group. 

Saviynt’s Enterprise Identity Cloud (EIC) is a cloud-native converged identity platform designed for streamlining identity and access management processes, for workforce, enterprise applications, privileged and third-party identities as part of a single solution.

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This approach enables security teams to manage the identity life cycle with automated workflows to govern identities at scale across on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments.

Protecting identities in the cloud 

The funding comes as organizations have continually failed to secure identities against threat actors, with research showing that 80% of organizations suffered identity-related breaches in the last 12 months. 

One of the key challenges that contributes to this lack of security is that organizations don’t have the technologies or processes in place to consistently enforce access management controls throughout on-premises and cloud environments. 

“Applications drive today’s modern organization and are at the core of every digital transformation. The central challenge of managing identity in the cloud is ensuring secure and reliable access control to resources while maintaining user privacy and compliance with regulatory requirements at a time where there is massive growth in identities,” said Sachin Nayyar, Saviynt CEO and founder. 

“This includes ensuring the authenticity of users and devices, whether they are employees, third parties or machine identities, and protecting against unauthorized or over-provisioned access. It can also be challenging to integrate and synchronize identities across different cloud environments and on-premises systems,” Nayyar said. 

Reviewing the IAM market 

Saviynt’s solution falls under the IAM market, which researchers valued at $12.3 billion in 2020 and anticipate will reach $34.5 billion in 2028 as organizations attempt to keep up with mounting security and compliance concerns. 

One of the company’s main competitors in the space is SailPoint Technologies, a cloud IAM provider that offers the SailPoint Identity Security Platform, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to discover and automate real-time access. Last year, Thoma Bravo acquired SailPoint Technologies for $6.9 billion.

Another significant competitor in the space is Okta, which offers a Workforce Identity Cloud solution with single sign-on, adaptive multifactor authentication capabilities and life cycle management capabilities. Okta expects to generate total revenue of $1.8 billion in 2023.

Nayyar argues that the key differentiator between Saviynt and its competitors is its cloud-native approach to identity security. 

“Unlike legacy identity security providers like SailPoint, Saviynt offers a cloud-native, converged identity platform for workforce, enterprise applications, privileged and third-party identities to provide the best user experience for solving the greatest number of use cases with the highest ROI and lowest TCO,” Nayyar said.