Here’s how SailPoint is securing AI adoption in APAC with AWS

Channel partners have the opportunity to plug real security and governance gaps as APAC enterprises rush to reach their AI goals.

Fragmented legacy systems, inconsistent identity controls, and the lack of governance at scale are holding back Asia Pacific enterprises from achieving their agentic AI ambitions — and likely putting organizations at risk of security “blind spots”.

This is why identity security vendor SailPoint signed a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier this year to develop a unified governance layer to manage all identities, human and non-human.

“Agentic AI creates a fast-growing population of non-human identities, each of which can become a new attack surface if it is not properly governed,” Dave Schwartz, senior vice president of Global Partners at SailPoint told CRN Asia.

As enterprises in APAC move from experimentation to deployment, Schwartz shared that many have found the organization’s existing identity and access models unprepared to host autonomous agents that can make decisions, access systems, and act at machine speed.

“This creates blind spots around ownership, entitlements, accountability, and auditability,” he said.

This is made more complex for enterprises operating in the region due to tightening data sovereignty and compliance requirements across markets such as Indonesia and Vietnam.

‘Speed and security aren’t trade-offs’

Schwartz believes that taking an identity-first approach can help enterprises overcome those challenges.

“The starting point is to treat identity as foundational infrastructure for agentic AI, not as an afterthought,” he said. “Organizations need a unified governance layer that can manage all identities interacting with AI systems, including human, machine, and agentic identities, with visibility, policy enforcement, and lifecycle controls built in from the start.”

The AWS-SailPoint collaboration is designed around that principle, with intended capabilities including lifecycle governance, continuous least-privilege access, a unified identity graph, and automated guardrails that can revoke or adjust access based on changes in behavior, role, or risk.

“You can't scale AI without getting identity right,” said Chris Casey, director of APJ Partner Sales and Development at AWS.

“Our strategic collaboration with SailPoint focuses on giving customers a unified governance layer from day one — so every identity, whether human or machine, is managed consistently and securely.

“The takeaway for customers is that speed and security aren't trade-offs — if you build on the right foundations, you can move faster because your governance model is strong, not in spite of it.”

Supporting APAC’s AI ambitions

This is why both Casey and Schwartz agreed that the region’s race to adopt AI presents channel partners the opportunity to help customers transform in a more effective way.

“For APAC channel partners, the collaboration opens up a stronger route to market around one of the region’s biggest emerging needs: helping enterprises adopt AI securely,” said Schwartz.

“In practice, partners can tap on this as advisers on secure AI transformation, especially for customers in regulated industries or markets with growing sovereignty requirements.”

There is also an opportunity for partners to support customers’ SaaS modernisation journeys, added Schwartz, particularly for customers looking to move to a modern identity security platform that can govern both human and non-human identities in a single pane of glass.

“This is really about unlocking a clear, high-value use case at a time when customers are trying to move quickly on AI but running into real security and governance gaps,” said Casey.

“Our collaboration gives partners a more complete way to solve that by combining AWS infrastructure with SailPoint's identity capabilities to help customers manage both human and non-human identities from day one.

“It also streamlines how customers procure and deploy solutions through AWS Marketplace, so projects don't stall in the procurement process.”