SailPoint’s Limits in SaaS Management and Identity Governance
SailPoint is a well-established player in the identity governance space. Its strength lies in managing complex, deeply integrated enterprise systems through policy-based controls, access reviews, and lifecycle workflows. But when it comes to SaaS applications—especially disconnected or non-standard tools—SailPoint’s model quickly hits its limits.
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SailPoint governs what’s integrated. Zygon shows you what’s real.
SaaS Management That Only Works with APIs
SailPoint’s SaaS Management module is built on the assumption that applications offer direct integrations. That works for some systems—but only a fraction of them.
- If a SaaS app doesn’t expose an API or SCIM endpoint, it’s invisible to SailPoint.
- If it’s not integrated with Entra, Okta, or PingOne, it won’t be discovered.
- And even if there is an integration, it may require a premium tier or technical setup that most business units won’t have access to.
The result? A governance solution that only works for the well-behaved 5–10% of your SaaS landscape.
Meanwhile, many enterprises are running 300 to 500+ SaaS applications—used by teams like marketing, sales, legal, and finance—that aren’t covered by SailPoint’s connectors. Those apps still contain sensitive data and identity risk, but remain completely unmonitored.
No Visibility into What Business Users Actually Use
SailPoint focuses on what’s officially sanctioned and integrated. But users often sign up for tools on their own. These are invisible to IT unless surfaced by another layer.
And SailPoint doesn’t enable end-users to collaborate with IT. There’s no built-in interface for a user to say:
“Yes, I’m using this tool. Here’s my account. Please help govern it.”
Instead, SailPoint stays in the backend—working only with the apps it can reach through APIs. This blind spot is dangerous, especially when business-critical apps are used without proper oversight.
A Model Built for Legacy IT, Not Modern SaaS
SailPoint’s architecture was built to provision and deprovision complex systems—mainframes, on-premise ERP, tightly governed internal apps. That model makes sense for centralized IT. But modern SaaS environments are distributed, team-owned, and fast-moving.
These tools don’t need heavyweight integration and deep policy modeling. They need:
- Lightweight account tracking
- Clear ownership
- A simple interface for users to flag usage
- And easy task generation for IT to take action
With SailPoint alone, the IT and security teams operate on one set of assumptions, while business users operate on another. There’s no shared source of truth, and no practical way to close the loop.
Where Zygon Comes In
Zygon is designed for what SailPoint doesn’t see.
- Discover all applications in use, regardless of whether they’re integrated.
- Identify who owns and uses each app, even outside the IT team.
- Enable conversations between business users and IT about what’s in use and why.
- Automate provisioning and deprovisioning, even for apps with no API, through agent-based execution.
- Feed identity context back into SailPoint, enriching your existing governance framework with full visibility.
Zygon doesn’t compete with SailPoint—it completes it.
Conclusion
SailPoint gives you governance over the core. But your SaaS stack is broader, messier, and faster-moving than what SailPoint can see.
If you’re serious about identity governance in the age of SaaS sprawl, you need a solution that covers the full picture, not just the part that fits inside an API box.
FAQ
All the questions you can have
SailPoint's software provides tools for identity management, access governance, and compliance, which are crucial for ensuring that users have the appropriate access to technology resources while also protecting sensitive data and meeting regulatory requirements.
Key features of SailPoint's solutions typically include:
- Identity Governance: Managing and governing user access to ensure that the right individuals have access to the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.
- Access Request and Certification: Allowing users to request access to resources and enabling periodic reviews of access rights to ensure they are still appropriate.
- Compliance Management: Helping organizations comply with various regulatory requirements by providing tools to manage and report on access controls.
- Integration Capabilities: Offering integrations with various enterprise systems and applications to provide a unified view of identity and access management across an organization.
SailPoint is widely used in industries where managing digital identities and ensuring secure access to systems are critical, such as finance, healthcare, and government
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework of policies, technologies, and processes that ensures the appropriate individuals or entities (such as employees, customers, partners, or devices) are granted the right access to the right resources at the right time and for the right reasons within an organization's digital environment. IAM is a critical component of cybersecurity and plays a central role in safeguarding an organization's sensitive data, applications, and systems.
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