The Identity Navigator

Hosted by Rohit Agnihotri

Technology

Website RSS feed LinkedIn YouTube

Episodes

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

About the show

Welcome to "The Identity Navigator," your compass in the world of Identity and Access Management (IAM). Join us as we navigate the complexities of digital identity, security, and access control. Stay informed with expert insights, industry trends, and practical tips to safeguard your organization's digital assets. Whether you're new to IAM or a seasoned pro, tune in to unlock the strategies that will elevate your security posture. Subscribe to The Identity Navigator podcast and chart your course to secure, efficient IAM solutions.

Listen to episodes

43 recent

August 16, 2026Episode 4230 min

#42 PulseAI and the Hard Question: What Is Your AI Actually Doing

Everyone is using AI. Almost nobody can prove what it’s doing. In this solo episode, we design a runtime AI governance platform from scratch on a whiteboard, and then meet PulseAI, the product IAM veteran Amit Masand built at IDMEXPRESS. With the numbers justifying the problem, an honest competitive map, who it’s not for, and a free AI-traffic risk assessment for listeners. Links PulseAI by IDMEXPRESS: idmexpress.ai Company site: idmexpress.com) Amit Masand on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amit-m-67b4692 Contact: amit.masand@idmexpress.com Listener offer: mention this episode for a complimentary risk assessment of your AI traffic, no commitment. Thank you for listening: Host's contacts LinkedIn : ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agnihotri⁠ Email : theIdentityNavigator@gmail.com

August 4, 2026Episode 4134 min

#41 - IGA or IdP? Who Provisions the New App - OIM, SailPoint, Saviynt, Entra, Okta

Previously on The Identity Navigator ( recommendedlistening before this episode ): Episode 40: SCIM - The protocol that finally made provisioning grow up Every app you onboard forces a quiet architecture decision most teams never make explicitly: does provisioning belong to your IGA platform (OIM, SailPoint IIQ, Saviynt) or your IdP (Entra, Okta)? In this episode, I walk through the five questions that settle it - before the app lands in your ecosystem, not after. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agnihotri Email: theIdentityNavigator@gmail.com

July 5, 2026Episode 4046 min

#40 SCIM - The Protocol That Finally Made Provisioning Grow Up

0-40% of SaaS accounts in the mid-2000s belonged to people who'd already left the company. Ghost accounts, quietly sitting there — and that sadly hasn't changed much today. This episode: where SCIM came from, what it actually solves, and what it still doesn't. Core RFCs: RFC 7642 — SCIM: Definitions, Overview, Concepts, and Requirements RFC 7643 — SCIM: Core Schema RFC 7644 — SCIM: Protocol Key Terms Covered: SCIM 2.0 — System for Cross-domain Identity Management JML — Joiner-Mover-Leaver lifecycle IGA — Identity Governance and Administration IDP — Identity Provider (Okta, Entra ID, Ping, JumpCloud, OneLogin) JIT — Just-In-Time provisioning SPML — Service Provisioning Markup Language (the predecessor that didn't make it) PatchOp — SCIM's structured partial update format ServiceProviderConfig — SCIM's capability discovery endpoint Tools Mentioned: Identity Providers: Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping Identity, JumpCloud, OneLogin, CyberArk Identity IGA Platforms: SailPoint, Saviynt, IBM Security Verify Governance, Omada Identity Key SCIM-enabled Apps: Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, GitLab, Workday, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Zoom, Box, Atlassian SCIM Validator: scimvalidator.net — for testing SCIM endpoint compliance LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agnihotri Email: theIdentityNavigator@gmail.com

June 12, 2026Episode 3948 min

#39 Tokens — The Complete Story

The Complete Token Story Let me make you a promise: by the end of this episode, no one will be able to casually brush off the word “tokens” in front of you ever again. OAuth, Tokens, JWT, IAM, Identity, API Security, Zero Trust, Security Architecture, CISO, Engineering Leadership Thank you for listening LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agnihotri Email : theIdentityNavigator@gmail.com

May 10, 2026Episode 3835 min

#38 - The Basics of Workload Identity

In this episode of The Identity Navigator , Rohit explores workload identity from first principles: what it is, why it matters, and how it is reshaping modern identity security for microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, cloud workloads, and AI agents. The discussion compares workload identity with non-human identity management, API keys, Vault, and cloud-native identity services, then goes deeper into SPIFFE, SPIRE, federation, and the future of identity in agentic systems. If you want a clear, practical explanation of workload identity and why it is becoming essential in zero trust architectures, this episode is for you. LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agnihotri Email : theIdentityNavigator@gmail.com

April 25, 2026Episode 3735 min

#37 - Identity Categorization Done Right

In this episode we explore together the “uncanny valley” of identity categorization , where taxonomy looks mature on paper but doesn’t meaningfully change controls in practice. We talk about Taxonomic Debt and control plane behind them. From service accounts and workload identities to bots, technical users, and AI agents, we argues that the real unit ofgovernance is not the label, it’s the behavior: interactive ornon-interactive, ephemeral or persistent, privileged or not. If your IAM program has ever felt like governance theater, this episode will help you see why. You’ll walk away with a clearer way to categorize identities by how they behave, how they’re secured, and how the system should react when they drift from expectations. Thank you for listening LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agnihotri Email: theIdentityNavigator@gmail.com

March 22, 2026Episode 3632 min

#36 - Your Face Belongs to Lensa

In late November 2022, a little-known app called Lensa went from obscurity to everywhere. Celebrities, influencers, and millions of ordinary people uploaded their selfies and got back stunning AI-generated portraits, fantasy warriors, Renaissance paintings, cyberpunk heroes, and more. The app’s viral “MagicAvatars” feature launched in late November and propelled Lensa to the No. 1 spot on the iOS App Store’s Photo & Video charts. At the center of thefrenzy was a simple pitch: pay a few dollars, upload a handful of selfies, and watch AI turn you into art. But the backlash arrived fast. Critics flagged hypersexualized outputs for women, artist concerns over training data and styleappropriation, and privacy questions about what users were actually agreeing to when they uploaded their faces. Reporting at the time noted that Prisma Labs’ terms allowed the app to use user content to operate or improve the service, and that the company updated its privacy policy in December 2022 amid thecontroversy. This episode is a story about virality, timing, and the dark incentives hiding inside consumer AI. It’s about how a polished interface, an irresistible social loop, and a moment of cultural hype can turn into an extraordinary revenue machine. TechCrunch reported that Lensa generated more than $70 million from the app in November 2022 alone, with Sensor Tower data showing the app’s downloads jumping to 1.6 million in November, up 631% from October. But the bigger question is not whether Lensa was clever. It’s what its success reveals about the AI era: speed can outrun ethics, product can outrun governance, and ordinary users often surrender far more than they realize in exchange for convenience and novelty. “The following represents my analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and reporting.”

February 28, 2026Episode 3527 min

#35 - How Stolen Sessions are Bypassing MFA and How to Finally Stop Them

Imagine this: Tuesday morning. Security dashboard green. MFA at 100%. Privileged accounts vaulted. Fortress built. Then an attacker logs in as your CFO via a stolen browser cookie. No password guess. No brute force. Your stack? Silent. We dive into Pass-the-Cookie attacks, the elite technique bypassing MFA via infostealer malware and AiTM phishing. We cover: Bearer tokens as the “keycard anyone can use” Microsoft’s Token Protection with PRT + TPM for device-bound proof-of-possession Okta FastPass, device binding, and ASN/IP session controls DBSC: Browsers’ revival of Token Binding to kill cookie theft forever Plus your playbook of what features to Enable. Technical deep dive for IAM leaders.

February 14, 2026Episode 3431 min

#34: Move 37: The Moment AI Stopped Playing by Human Rules

In March 2016, a machine made a move in the ancient game of Go that changed everything. A commentator, a world-class professional, watched it and said: "This is not a human move." Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players alive, took off his glasses, stood up, and walked away from the board. For 15 minutes, he just sat in silence, shaken. That move was AlphaGo's Move 37. And it's a prophecy about the future we're building. But why am I telling this story on our podcast: Move 37 was the moment we realized something terrifying: you can create asystem that makes better decisions than humans, but in ways humans cannot understand. 'I felt like I was playing against something unnatural.' The machine placed a stone at the 3-3 point. By human logic, it was wrong. By optimal logic, it was beautiful. And Lee Sedol had no way to predict why it was right, because it existed in a part of the strategy space that human intuition doesn't explore. Now imagine that dynamic playing out across the economy. Hiring algorithms that downrank resumes in ways we can'texplain. Trading algorithms that make moves at microsecond speeds. Pricing systems that are optimal but alien. Credit decisions that are mathematically perfect but incomprehensible. Each one is playing its own Move 37. And humans are in Lee Sedol's position: watching, confused, realizing too late that we no longer understand the game.

January 24, 2026Episode 3324 min

#33 How Good Is Your AI, Really?

Most AI projects don’t fail because the models are dumb. They fail because the business questions are. In this episode, we breaks down why “95% accuracy” has become the most dangerous comfort blanket in enterprise AI and what leaders should be looking at instead. Through a healthcare claims story, email spam examples, fraud scenarios, and churn prediction, we walks you from the simple accuracy metric into the world of confusion matrices,precision, recall, and F1, translated into dollars, risk, and customer pain. You’ll hear how a “highly accurate” model can quietly route all your complex work to the wrong people, miss the customers you most needed to save, or block the transactions you can least afford to lose. This is a practical, and very human conversation about thresholds as business knobs, not technical parameters; about choosing consciously what you can afford to getwrong; and about the handful of questions every identity, security, and AI leader should ask before signing off on the next “95% accurate” pilot. If you’ve ever sat through a model-performance review and thought, “This sounds great, but what does it do to my P&L?”, this episode is for you.