Engineering a Scalable Enterprise Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) Platform

Indexnine engineered the critical evolution of a niche auditing tool into a comprehensive Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform. By launching a secure provisioning engine, we bridged the gap between visibility and remediation, enabling the client to scale into the enterprise market and supporting a successful $165M+ acquisition.

Client: A Fast-Growing US-Based Cybersecurity Company
Industry: Cybersecurity (Identity & Access Management)

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Client Overview

The client is a fast-growing, US-based cybersecurity company operating within the high-stakes Identity and Access Management (IAM) sector. Founded to address the security challenges posed by fragmented digital environments, the company enables organizations to manage user permissions across disparate IT landscapes, including SaaS identity integrations, cloud providers, and on-premise systems.

Serving a roster of over 100 North American enterprise customers, the client rapidly established itself as a critical player in the enterprise identity security market. Their platform provides Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) with a unified view of permissions, securing complex digital estates against unauthorized access.

The Challenge

The client initially launched with a robust auditing product that solved a fundamental problem: providing a unified view of “who has access to what.” This identity visibility tool gained significant market traction.

As the product matured and adoption expanded among enterprise architecture teams, an important capability gap became evident.

North American enterprise customers consistently provided feedback that:

While identifying security risks was valuable
They required a solution that could also remediate them

North American enterprise customers consistently shared that while visibility into security risks was valuable, they increasingly required the ability to remediate those risks directly.

The existing tool could highlight unauthorized access, but could not revoke it. This limitation risked:

Categorizing the product as a passive reporting utility
Preventing it from being viewed as a mission-critical enterprise platform

To sustain growth and meet the demands of enterprise identity security, the client needed to evolve:

From a “read-only” auditing tool
Into a comprehensive Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform

This required transforming the product into an active, secure provisioning engine capable of managing permissions directly. This strategic move introduced significant technical complexity, requiring a shift from passive data collection to access provisioning automation in a live, distributed environment.

Solution Overview

Indexnine engaged in a multi-year partnership to architect and execute this critical growth phase. The objective was to build a scalable identity services platform that could seamlessly integrate remediation capabilities with the client’s existing auditing core.

The solution scope included:

Secure Provisioning Engine: Engineering a robust backend capable of executing reliable access changes (granting and revoking permissions) across hundreds of third-party applications.
Enterprise Integration Framework: Developing a highly extensible framework to handle API integration at enterprise scale, managing diverse standards ranging from modern REST and SOAP API integration to proprietary legacy protocols.
Platform Modernization: Continuous IAM platform modernization to refactor and harden the codebase, ensuring it met the compliance-ready identity platform standards required for enterprise adoption and acquisition readiness.

Our Approach

Approach & Methodology

The transformation was executed through a rigorous cybersecurity product engineering model that prioritized data integrity, security, and scalability.

Strategic Alignment & Discovery: The engagement began with deep-dive strategy workshops to map customer feedback to technical requirements. This ensured the new architecture directly addressed the market need for identity lifecycle management.
Microservices-Based Architecture: To handle the load of managing millions of permissions across diverse client environments, the team adopted a microservices-based architecture. This allowed independent scaling for different integration layers, ensuring performance stability under high load.
Transactional State Management: Moving to a “read-write” model required absolute reliability. The team implemented sophisticated transactional state management to verify that access changes were successfully propagated to target systems. This included automated rollback capabilities to prevent distributed systems consistency issues in the event of API failures.
Zero Trust Security Architecture: Given the privileged access required to manage user identities, the engine was built on Zero Trust security architecture principles. This included a least privilege access model, end-to-end encryption for all data in transit and at rest, and comprehensive audit logging and traceability for every transaction.
Enterprise Hardening: Throughout the partnership, the team focused on aligning the platform with rigorous enterprise security standards (such as ISO 27001), preparing the codebase for the technical due diligence of a public company acquisition.

Business impact

Impact & Outcomes

The evolution from a visibility tool to a full-service enterprise IAM solution was the primary driver of the client’s commercial success and enterprise value.

Successful $165M+ Acquisition: The successful cybersecurity product acquisition readiness strategy and platform evolution directly enabled the client’s acquisition by a global leader in identity security.
Expanded Total Addressable Market (TAM): By transforming into a comprehensive Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform, the client significantly expanded their market reach, serving complex enterprise needs beyond simple auditing.
Mission-Critical Status: The product transitioned from a supplemental reporting tool to an indispensable mission-critical enterprise platform used by large organizations to manage daily security posture.
Enterprise Architecture Scale: The robust, secure architecture allowed the client to meet the demanding technical requirements of large-scale US enterprise customers and pass rigorous technical scrutiny.

Differentiators

Product-Centric Engineering: The engineering team operated with a clear understanding of the commercial strategy, ensuring that technical decisions regarding identity provisioning platforms directly supported the business growth trajectory.
Complex Integration Expertise: The ability to architect a reliable “read-write” engine capable of orchestrating transactions across hundreds of disparate APIs was a critical factor in the platform’s reliability.
Lifecycle Partnership: The engagement spanned the full product journey, from the initial strategic launch through to the cybersecurity platform scaling and maturation phases required for a successful exit.
Security-First Mindset: Integrating Zero Trust security architecture from the ground up ensured the platform was secure by design, a non-negotiable requirement for the cybersecurity market.

Conclusion

This engagement demonstrates how strategic cybersecurity product engineering can transform a focused utility into a market-leading enterprise identity security platform. By bridging the gap between visibility and remediation through rigorous platform hardening and refactoring, Indexnine helped the client achieve sustainable growth, enterprise platform scalability, and a highly successful exit.

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