Identity at the Center

Shea McGrew, Chief Technology Officer at Maricopa County, returns to Identity at the Center one year after episode 376 to take on a question she first raised at our Identity After Dark session: when does digital identity become critical infrastructure? Jeff and Jim talk with Shea about how a county broadband and digital equity project led her to see digital trust as the thread running through ever...

Alex Bovee, CEO and co-founder of C1.ai (formerly ConductorOne), returns for his third appearance on Identity at the Center. Alex walks Jim and Jeff through the rebrand to C1.ai and why the .ai matters: identity now covers humans, workloads, and agents. The conversation opens on launch week and the new App Hub, built around a question many CIOs and CISOs are facing. What happens when everyone in t...

Jeff flies solo for episode 450, joined by Alexis Bernthal, an associate on RSM's technology risk consulting team who found her way to the podcast through a corporate-wide email and a contact form submission that led to an invitation to Identiverse. They trace how Alexis went from failing a high school computer science class to finishing a CS degree, and how a topic on the show, role-based acc...

George Fletcher joins Jeff Steadman and Sean O'Dell for a Decoded deep dive into transaction tokens (Txn-Tokens), the OAuth Working Group specification designed to secure requests as they move across microservices. George explains the problem transaction tokens solve: hop to hop security gaps, replayed access tokens, and the difficulty of tracking a single transaction across a graph of interna...

Howard Ting, CEO of Opal Security, joins Jeff Steadman for a Sponsor Spotlight covering identity governance for both human and non-human identities. Howard traces his path through RSA Security, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Nutanix, and Cyberhaven before returning to identity to lead Opal. The conversation covers why disabling a departing employee's account rarely ends their access, the orpha...

Jeff Steadman sits down with Andi Hindle, conference chair for Authenticate 2026, for a preview of this year's event. Making his seventh appearance on the show, Andi walks through how Authenticate has evolved since its founding alongside Identiverse and outlines six major topic areas shaping the 2026 agenda, including passkeys in practice, regulatory pressures, security and standards architect...

Rick Scot, Global CIO and CISO at Elevate Textiles, joins Jim and Jeff to talk about how he went from leading a data team to holding both the CIO and CISO seats at a global manufacturing company. Rick shares the moment that pulled him into security, how his tight-knit Charlotte cyber community shapes his thinking, and how he balances speed and control when the two roles pull in different direction...

Jim McDonald hosts this Sponsor Spotlight episode of Identity at the Center, made possible with support from Twine Security. Jim is joined by Benny Porat, co-founder and CEO of Twine Security and previously co-founder and CTO of Claroty. Benny shares how his cybersecurity background led him into identity and explains the concept of the "execution gap," the space where identity teams are...

Jeff and Jim open with the unavoidable topic of AI agents and the tension between enabling innovation and governing agent permissions, then run through a packed fall conference schedule. The August mailbag pulls questions from Singapore, Toronto, Prague, Johannesburg, Helsinki, and Seoul. They discuss when externalized authorization makes sense, why passkey recovery can become the weak link in phi...

Jeff and Jim are joined by John Huyette, AI Risk Leader at RSM, and Omer Arshed, North American Digital Identity Leader at RSM, to explore how identity controls can help organizations manage the growing risks of AI agents. John introduces five laws for managing AI risk: governability, lineage and integrity, trust boundaries, authority containment, and human impact. The conversation connects those...

Recorded live at Identiverse 2026 in Las Vegas on June 17, Jeff and Jim are joined by Bart Allan, General Manager at Bravura Security, for a live recording with a studio audience. In a late-night talk show format, the three host an open Q&A driven by IAM practitioners in the room. From securing AI identities to whether access reviews are headed the way of the password, this is an unscripted co...

Live from Identiverse 2026 in Las Vegas, Jeff and Jim sit down with Sachini Siriwardene, winner of this year's Kim Cameron Award, along with Ian Glazer of the Digital Identity Advancement Foundation (DIAF). Sachini shares how she moved from open banking API security into consumer identity work at a bank, and what led her to apply for the award named after identity pioneer Kim Cameron. Ian explains...

Recorded live at Identiverse 2026, Jeff and Jim sit down with returning guest Mike Kiser, Director of Strategy and Standards at SailPoint, for a wide-ranging conversation that spans two of the standards world's most active frontiers. The first half breaks down C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, explaining how it differs from digital watermarking, how metadata and cryp...

This Sponsor Spotlight episode, made possible with support from Tuebora, features Jim McDonald in conversation with Sanjay Nadimpalli, CEO and founder of Tuebora. Sanjay shares his path into identity beginning as one of the first engineers at Aveksa, then discusses how intelligence is reshaping identity governance and administration by replacing static configuration with continuous, context-aware...

Recorded live at Identiverse 2026 in Las Vegas, Jeff sits down with Decoded co-host Sean O'Dell for a wide-ranging state of the union on continuous identity, shared signals, and the identity questions AI keeps raising. Sean shares what he is hearing on the ground about the upcoming transaction tokens spec, why continuous identity has moved from concept to mainstream adoption, and how shared si...

Live from the IDAC booth at Identiverse 2026, Jeff and Jim sit down with Pam Dingle, Director of Identity Standards at Microsoft, to unpack agentic identity. Pam breaks down assistive versus autonomous agents, walks through where standards like SPIFFE and OAuth hold up, and explains the difference between delegation, impersonation, and partition. The conversation also covers credential discovery r...

In this Sponsor Spotlight episode, Jeff Steadman flies solo and welcomes Greg Danyi, co-founder and CTO of P0 Security, to the show. Greg walks through P0's approach to runtime access control, covering how it applies to humans, non-human identities, and AI agents alike. The conversation digs into the difference between authentication and authorization, why zero standing privilege is more achie...

Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman took the Identity at the Center podcast live at Identiverse 2026 in Las Vegas for a crowd-sourced game show called Majority Rules. Identity professionals competed in real time, picking answers to IAM and conference questions in a race to predict the majority. With a prize pool of over $5,000 for the top ten scorers, the stakes were high and the honesty was brutal. Th...

Recorded the night before Identiverse 2026 at BrewDog in Las Vegas, Jeff hosts a roundtable of IdentiBeer chapter leaders and community members from around the world. Espen Bago (Oslo), Marco Venuti (Rome and Milan), Heiko Klarl (Munich), Craig Ramsay (Nashville), Tina Srivastava and Elie Azerad (San Francisco), Bertrand Carlier (Paris, in planning), Ole Shved (Detroit, forming), and Roland Baum (...

Jim McDonald sits down with Dan Moore, Senior Director of CIAM Strategy and Identity Standards at FusionAuth, for an in-depth conversation on customer identity and access management. Dan explains how FusionAuth views authentication as the front door to any application and why control, deployment flexibility, and developer ownership are central to their approach. The discussion covers progressive r...

Jim McDonald takes the Identity at the Center podcast on the road to Rome, Italy, for a special two-part episode. The first segment is an IdentiBeer roundup where Jim gathers quick-fire takes from practitioners in the Italian IAM community, including Andrea Rossi and Alessandro Piscopo of IAMONES and Marco Venuti of Thales on the biggest trends shaping identity today. The second segment is a three...

Recorded live at EIC 2026 in Berlin, Jeff and Jim sit down with Martin Kuppinger, founder and distinguished analyst at KuppingerCole. They dig into the tectonic shifts AI is bringing to identity and security, the AI security fabric framework, why decentralized identity thinking may be essential for governing the agentic mesh, the ongoing debate over NHI terminology, what organizations can do tacti...

Recorded live at EIC 2026 in Berlin, Jeff and Jim sit down with Martin Sandren, IAM Product Lead at IKEA, for a wide-ranging conversation covering nearly every corner of modern identity security. Martin shares what has changed since his first IDAC appearance on episode 293, including the rise of AI, growing interest in digital sovereignty, and the maturing shared signals framework. The conversatio...

This episode is presented courtesy of SailPoint. Rob Sebaugh, Senior Identity Strategist at SailPoint, joins Jeff and Jim for a wide-ranging conversation on the past, present, and future of identity governance. Rob brings more than two decades of practitioner experience to the table, including 16 years running large-scale identity programs before making the move to the vendor side. The conversatio...

Recorded live at EIC 2026 in Berlin, Jeff and Jim sit down with Thomas Zarnhofer, IAM Architect at a major retail company in central Europe. Thomas shares his experience leading a full IGA transformation from a decade-old on-premise system to a modern cloud-based platform. The conversation covers the shift from a contract-based to a person-based identity model, the importance of cleaning data befo...