Pathlock CEO Piyush Pandey on Reshaping Application Access Governance: Insights from KuppingerCole Reports

The IT industry is currently experiencing a significant shift in priorities and focus on access tools. Enterprises are not just migrating essential functions to the cloud but also transitioning their point solutions to this digital domain. However, businesses require access tools that offer extensive visibility and control over multiple line-of-business applications.

KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass reports on Access Tools provide an essential strategic roadmap for any enterprise navigating this evolving IT landscape. The reports offer in-depth insights into SAP-specific environments and the broader application ecosystem. They highlight the most effective solutions for achieving comprehensive application access and control.

Today, we speak to Piyush Pandey, CEO of Pathlock, about how his company is shaping this new landscape and the company’s performance in the latest KuppingerCole reports.

Q: What are the key market trends that you’re seeing that influence product direction?

Pandey: “We’re seeing that businesses are moving key functions to the cloud for best-of-breed solutions, increased efficiency, cost savings, and overall scalability. Most large enterprises have a hybrid cloud environment for business applications. This transformation from on-premise to cloud business systems is changing the role of effective access governance and control management. Strong access controls are no longer a nice-to-have feature; it’s become an absolute necessity.”

Q: Pathlock has received some significant recognition in the latest KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass reports. What is your initial reaction?

Pandey: “Yes, we’re absolutely thrilled! Our showing in these reports is a testament to our product and innovation leadership. Following our M&A announcements in the Spring of 2022 (i.e., Pathlock, Appsian, Security Weaver), we have been working diligently to integrate our companies and build on the solutions that had already made such a positive impact in the application GRC market. We couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.”

Q: That’s impressive! Could you elaborate a bit more on the recognition in the reports?

Pandey: “Of course. In the Access Control Tools for Multi-Vendor LoB Environments report, we were named the Overall Leader, and in the Access Control Tools for SAP Environments report, we were recognized as both a Product Leader and an Innovation Leader. Speaking of the LoB report, it was an honor to see our position as compared to the other solutions. Having such definitively positive validation from KuppingerCole was wonderful to see.”

Q: How do you stand out from other vendors in the market?

Pandey: “While our expertise in SAP environments is widely recognized, our real strength lies in our adaptability. We’re capable of supporting a broad range of LoB applications, catering to diverse customer needs. Unlike traditional identity vendors who might struggle with visibility into a large number of LoB applications, we’ve built our solutions with a deep understanding of controls management, audit compliance, continuous controls monitoring, risk quantification, and vulnerability management. This is our most important differentiation—to provide application GRC solutions for different business applications and on an aggregated basis for various applications within the customer ecosystems in a single view. Our comprehensive approach enables us to offer an enterprise-grade solution.”

Q: KuppingerCole’s recognition must feel like a significant endorsement of Pathlock’s strategic vision.

Pandey: “Definitely. This recognition is more than an endorsement. It validates our strategic vision that we’ve been nurturing since May 2022, which is to reshape the application access governance market. But we know our journey isn’t over. We will continue to drive innovation to help customers achieve automation and efficiency in managing their audit process. These reports are important milestones, but we have more work to do and more innovations to explore.”

Q: How would you sum up Pathlock’s vision today?

Pandey: “In the face of such evolving cyber and information security landscape, managing access and internal controls is becoming a new business-critical objective. Companies must adopt a risk-reduction approach. At Pathlock, we’re committed to reducing risk across a diverse line of business applications (Finance, HR, Supply Chain, Sales, etc.) and systems today while building automation key to internal control processes in the future. KuppingerCole’s recognition is a great motivator for us to continue striving to be the go-to choice for dynamic and robust access control automation solutions.”

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