The Power of Data in an AI-Driven World

For decades, the massive, often unmanageable amounts of information with which enterprises struggle to process have proven a tough challenge and, for most, an untapped wealth of knowledge. Being data-driven is often an executive goal, but one that many organizations have yet to truly grasp.

The issue? Data quality, integrity, and hygiene have not yet been solved, especially in identity security. Many enterprise identity programs are fragmented, relying on data scattered across silos, often orphaned, with duplications and missing attributes prevalent.

And, all too often, data hygiene never quite makes it onto organizations’ priority lists. A “data cleanup” project isn’t enticing to board levels, executives, or even IT professionals. And the tiresome, intensive process is never really finished, preventing the dopamine hit that comes with completing such a massive undertaking.

With AI, You Get What You Give

Today, there’s an extra complication with data: AI. AI feeds on it.

Just look at the top models’ responses for version 1.0 with those available today. Train an AI model on a few terabytes of data, and you get toddler-like answers in response. But train it on petabytes or more, and now it can perform basic reasoning and hold human-like conversations.

Here’s the rub: organizations already have mountains of identity data, activity logs, entitlements, descriptions, events, you name it. But the historic lack of data hygiene prioritization has made this data unreliable, at best. The old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” reigns supreme: feed AI garbage data, and you’ll get garbage results. Additionally, legacy identity platforms often impose unnecessary restrictions, by today’s standards.

With AI already a ubiquitous part of any enterprise’s tech stack and workflows, organizations must rethink their approach to identity security data. Now.

Overcoming the Current Identity Security Data Challenges

For organizations to be able to use the data buried within their systems, they must first conquer three challenges: incomplete data, poor data hygiene, and legacy platform restrictions.

The First Challenge: Incomplete Data

• Even with the wealth of available data in today’s enterprises, most of it remains incomplete. Meaning, an entitlement exists and you know about it, but it’s missing (or has a bad) description. Or, event logs have outdated or incomplete references. Unfortunately, because the majority of applications aren’t onboarded into the average organization’s identity security program, the ways incomplete data rears its ugly head are numerous.

• And, the more apps you have, the larger the challenge becomes. While you could be giving your identity security more data signals to work with and provide valuable insights, instead, you’re left wondering who has access to what, and what potential risks are hidden within the business.

• To solve this challenge, you must onboard every application into your identity security platform, another project unlikely to be enthusiastically undertaken, as traditional methods make the process cumbersome, to say the least. However, an AI-powered identity security platform like Saviynt can turn this often weeks-long project into a mere hours-long one.

The Second Challenge: Poor Data Hygiene

• Orphaned accounts, stale roles, misclassified entitlements, the list goes on. When data isn’t looked after, it quickly rots and threatens to corrupt any processes that use it, insight, analytics and intelligence generation chief among them. Without these, business users must guess at the right decisions during certifications or approvals, opening the organization to greater risk.

• Simply put, data hygiene is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a required process for every organization, regardless of size, complexity or maturity level. Improper data hygiene means enterprises will fail to realize the benefits they could be getting from technology such as AI.

• AI-powered identity security platforms like Saviynt, however, can get your data clean and keep it that way. Processes like automatic deduplication, role rationalization, description and entitlement improvements (and completion) all help to improve the quality of your data. In turn, this delivers better results with your AI investments: more accurate predictions, fewer escalations, and smarter automation across your enterprise.

The Third Challenge: Legacy Platform Restrictions

• Data is only helpful if it can be used, especially by your AI agents. But legacy identity security tools weren’t prepared for AI and they haven’t adapted quickly enough to meet organizations’ needs. Many still require business users to be pseudo-experts at SQL just to receive a report.

• In some cases, organizations have turned to AI agents to help. But providing blanket access to AI agents to enable your business users isn’t the right method either. AI is as much of a risk as it is a boon, and you must have the proper controls and guardrails in place to ensure your use of AI is safe and secure.

• Solving this challenge requires you to rethink your approach to AI. To be trustworthy, AI must be considered as another identity type in your organization, requesting and accessing data under the same restrictions (if not stronger ones) than any other identity.

• Once you’ve shifted your way of thinking and implemented a modern, intelligent identity security platform that understands all that AI brings to the table, you can unlock the data within your organization through AI. In turn, your entire organization can generate data-driven, context-rich insights through simple conversations, without coding or log diving.

From Reactive to Proactive

What an intelligent identity security platform like Saviynt offers you is the chance to revolutionize your approach. Rather than chase the status quo and feel behind, your organization is the one raising the bar and ready for anything.

• Unlocking Unparalleled Visibility: Comprehensive, deep, pervasive visibility only occurs when you have everything in your organization onboarded to your identity security platform. All apps. All identities. In every environment. With LLM-powered app onboarding with agentic AI workflows, Saviynt Identity Cloud ensures you’re building complete data sets. Meanwhile, automatic discovery means you discover every identity, including AI agents, throughout your organization, so everything is under corporate purview.

• Obtaining Trustworthy Data: As you onboard more applications and identities, you can ensure all data is high-quality and keeps its integrity as it moves throughout your enterprise through your intelligent identity security platform. Centralizing all identity data entitlements, permissions, events/activity, and more — in one location empowers everyone in your organization to have all the context to make smarter, more data-driven decisions.

• Getting Valuable Insights: Think about the last time you needed a report from your identity security platform. How long did it take? Hours? Days? Weeks? What if you could instead get those same results by simply holding a conversation? And voilà, within minutes, get all the answers to those all-important identity questions, with full context and next steps. Conversational identity security, powered by solutions like Saviynt MCP Server, is a fundamental change, where information is democratized and everyone is empowered to be more secure.

Tomorrow’s Challenges are Already Here. Is Your Identity Security Ready?

Intelligent identity means organizations are no longer bottlenecked by poor processes and restricted workflows. Instead, all users are empowered to be more productive and secure, and in ways and formats that feel natural to use and easy to understand, like a conversation with an AI agent. This is all underpinned by perpetually clean, accurate, and up-to-date identity data that empowers everyone to make confident decisions.

With Saviynt Identity Cloud, organizations can know (not guess at) what’s going on in their identity security program. See for yourself what an intelligent identity security platform could do for your organization. Request a demo of the Saviynt Identity Cloud today.