ServiceNow’s Veza integration fuels identity security push for the AI era

Acknowledging that Veza was approached by every other cybersecurity vendor to be acquired as well, Tarun Thakur, GVP and GM of Veza from ServiceNow Identity Security felt that this itself showed the importance of identity security in this AI era.

ServiceNow recently unveiled its Autonomous Security vision with six unified solutions which will deliver prevention-first, AI-native cyber defense. The solutions come as ServiceNow continues to build the world's most complete end-to-end security offering following the acquisitions and integrations of Armis and Veza into its platform.

The Armis acquisition, which closed in April this year, provides continuous, non-invasive visibility across every connected asset, tracking billions of devices in real time. Meanwhile, Veza's Access Graph maps effective permissions across human, machine, and AI identities following the completion of the acquisition in March this year after the deal was announced in December 2025.

With the integrations into ServiceNow's AI Control Tower, Context Engine, and orchestration layer, organizations have access to unified business and operational intelligence that enables autonomous remediation with full governance and auditability.

CRN Asia recently caught up with Tarun Thakur, GVP and GM of Veza from ServiceNow Identity Security business at the ServiceNow World Forum 2026 in Sydney to understand more about the integration in ServiceNow and the opportunities he is seeing in the region in the industry.

According to Thakur, the massive customer base that ServiceNow has was something he would never have been able to achieve as an independent customer. Hence, when the deal was being discussed, he knew that the opportunities available from ServiceNow once Veza was integrated would be a game changer for the industry.

“A lot of customers I met at this event want to do more with ServiceNow. They already do IT with ServiceNow, and now they want to do identity security use cases. The integration was really fast, but it was not easy. We had to bring two companies together, which included the culture and the people. And to be honest, some people prefer to remain a startup and don’t want to be in a big company. So, it was a challenging process which went through a digestive system and now we just have to keep moving forward,” he explained.

Thakur also pointed out that since ServiceNow had their own thesis of why they needed to acquire Veza, it made the integration quicker.

“There were product and engineering teams already thinking, how will we integrate the two companies. For example, ServiceNow did not want to integrate the Veza Access Graph with a CMDM as it was a relational database while Veza was a graph database. You want to integrate them so that we can send signals to each other, but we don't want to take Veza’s functionality and move it to CMDB. We'll never do that. We will never re-platform. But we do want to integrate at a management level. Because from a customer perspective, you should get one experience, not two experiences,” Thakur said.

Identity security and ServiceNow

With the cybersecurity industry witnessing many identity security vendors and startups being acquired, Thakur believes that Veza was in a very fortunate position with the ServiceNow acquisition. Acknowledging that Veza was even approached by every other cybersecurity vendor to be acquired as well, he felt that this itself showed the importance of identity security in this AI era.

“So, Veza was acquired on 2nd March and its now August. In just the last 4 months, there have been 12 brand new identity startups funded to the tune of US$2 billion of venture capital money. Can you believe that? But that just tells you identity access is the fundamental problem we have to get right in this world of AI,” he said.

For Thakur, to get the focus right on identity security specifically, the products need to be built on three lanes. The first lane is visibility and intelligence or identity observability, which is all about understanding who has access to what.

The second is identity governance, which manages access when someone joins or leaves an organization. The third is next-gen identity access, which relates to modern agentic identities.

“And so, three are three different use cases, three different buying budgets, and we've built about eight products on top of our platform,” Thakur said.

For ServiceNow, this is also where Autonomous Security moves companies from reactive, fragmented security to prevention-first, autonomously governed security that operates faster than AI creates risk. The Autonomous Security offerings stand on six solutions that integrate into ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower.