Identity has become a foundational element of enterprise cybersecurity. As organizations operate across hybrid infrastructure, SaaS platforms, multi-cloud environments, and automated workloads, identity security must extend beyond access enablement into continuous governance, risk management, and enforcement.

SailPoint is a long-established leader in Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). It is widely adopted to manage identity lifecycle processes, access requests, certifications, and compliance reporting across large enterprises. For organizations focused on ensuring appropriate access through structured workflows and audit-driven controls, SailPoint provides a mature and trusted governance platform.

However, modern identity risk increasingly emerges outside periodic governance cycles. Excessive entitlements, cloud permissions, non-human identities, and behavioral anomalies can introduce exposure in real time—often between access reviews or approval processes. In governance-centric architectures, enforcement is typically indirect, delayed, or dependent on downstream systems.

As identity attack surfaces expand, many organizations encounter a structural challenge: governance alone does not equate to continuous identity security.

This document examines that architectural distinction.

SailPoint represents a governance-centric identity model, optimized for lifecycle management, access certification, and compliance oversight. Cross Identity represents identity security as cybersecurity infrastructure, where governance, access, privilege, cloud entitlements, risk, and compliance operate as a single, converged control plane.

The comparison in this report is not about replacing identity governance platforms or diminishing their value. It is about understanding how identity security should operate at enterprise scale:

• SailPoint is optimized for structured governance, access approvals, and compliance-driven oversight.
• Cross Identity is optimized for continuous, real-time identity control and enforcement across the entire identity estate.

The purpose of this document is to help organizations determine which architectural approach best aligns with their identity maturity, cloud adoption, operational complexity, and risk posture-particularly in environments where identity risk must be managed continuously, not just reviewed periodically.