Clear Skye puts identity security where the work already happens

At Wärtsilä, the problem was getting an identity program to happen at all. The marine and energy technology business had struggled to get two IAM efforts off the ground. Homegrown processes carried on doing the work. Its workforce kept moving. A third attempt needed more than a promising feature list: it needed somewhere familiar to land.

The company turned to ServiceNow, a platform it already used, and to Clear Skye, which builds identity governance inside it. Clear Skye’s published customer account describes more than 20,000 employees and consultants across 68 countries. At that scale, the place where a request lands can matter almost as much as the rule that approves it. A beautifully designed security process is of limited use if nobody can find the door.

01 / The extra door nobody asked for

An employee changes departments. In the tidy version of events, the new job brings new permissions and the old permissions disappear. In practice, several people may own pieces of that transition. HR records the move. IT handles accounts. A manager approves access. Security asks whether the resulting combination is safe. Later, an auditor asks what happened. Each handoff needs the same story about the same person.

Clear Skye’s argument is that a separate identity platform makes those conversations harder to keep together. Its flagship IGA product places identity data and governance functions on the Now Platform, alongside ServiceNow applications for service management, configuration data, risk, and security operations. The distinction is architectural: identity becomes another workload in an existing working environment.

That is a focused position in the enterprise identity market. SailPoint and Saviynt are alternatives buyers may evaluate for governance. Clear Skye makes a particular appeal to organizations committed to ServiceNow. The relevant comparison is how each option fits the organization’s systems, administrators, and approval habits. A procurement checklist that counts features but ignores those habits misses a sizeable part of the purchase.

02 / Fifty applications before the big idea

Co-founders Vahan Galachyan and TJ Gryziec met while working at Morrison & Foerster, the law firm. Clear Skye’s origin account dates the company to 2016 and says they had built more than 50 applications on ServiceNow before envisioning an IGA platform. They knew the surroundings before choosing the room.

An early endorsement came in 2017, when ClearSkye took second place in ServiceNow’s CreatorCon Challenge and received a $150,000 cash investment. The competition described a product that documented approvals, assigned ownership, and automated account creation and disabling. The early proposition already contained the central idea: put the record and the work together.

03 / Permission, translated into ordinary work

The everyday product is less mysterious than its initials. Access Request lets employees ask for application access through the ServiceNow portal. Behind the catalog item sits a “Point of Access”: a bundle of roles or entitlements, information, and approvals. Application owners can help create these bundles without needing a developer for every item. The employee asks for something recognizable; the system handles the permissions underneath.

Lifecycle management addresses the joiner, mover, and leaver sequence. It can grant access according to policy, change it as a role changes, and remove it when appropriate. Access Reviews tackles the later question: should this person still have these permissions? Its identity warehouse brings access information together, while review actions can supply context or delegate a decision to someone better placed to make it.

Separation of Duties supplies another kind of test. Someone who can approve a payment and write a check may have a dangerous combination of powers. Clear Skye lets policies express these business capabilities, checks requests before access is granted, and runs detective checks on a schedule. Findings can trigger an exception approval, remediation workflow, or a block. Its policy engine also supports required combinations, such as a financial administrator needing multifactor authentication.

04 / The queue is part of the price

At retail data-science company 84.51°, a small ServiceNow team and manual access processes created dependencies between teams. Clear Skye’s case study says it introduced centralized requests and automation. Chris Miller described an access task that previously took users 20 minutes, with repeated exchanges with security personnel, taking two minutes afterward. This is a customer-reported comparison, not a universal delivery promise.

The useful economic question follows: how much of an access process is spent doing necessary work, and how much is spent finding the person who can do it? Buying software will not settle that question automatically. A queue can survive a new interface quite comfortably. Clear Skye’s approach gives a buyer a reason to examine the route, the ownership, and the record together.

The commercial offering is enterprise SaaS with a sales-led buying process. A practical budget must include the ServiceNow platform, the IGA software, application connectivity, implementation, and ongoing administration. Clear Skye offers Expert Services for architecture, migrations, connector development, upgrades, and validation. Its partner program lists firms including DXC, GlideFast, and Accenture. The product comes with an ecosystem of people who help put it to work.

Native deployment reduces the need to connect an external governance platform back into ServiceNow. Applications outside that platform still need a way to exchange data and carry out changes. Clear Skye provides connectors and standards-based options, along with approaches for disconnected systems. “Native” is an important design choice; it does not make every application in an enterprise cooperative.

05 / First explain why

Clear Skye announced a $4.95 million seed round in May 2020 and a $14 million Series A in March 2022, co-led by Storm Ventures and Toba Capital. The latter announcement reported roughly fivefold revenue growth in 2021 and nearly $20 million in cumulative funding. Those figures describe a historical financing moment, rather than today’s operating scale.

“Identity Management is a critical process that should not live in a vacuum”John Milburn, CEO / 2020 funding announcement

The product’s more recent direction extends that argument to understanding. In March 2026, IGA 5.4 introduced read-only AI assistance, configurable authoritative mappings, lifecycle testing, and a spreadsheet-like review view. An April announcement described plans to demonstrate Now Assist for Clear Skye IGA at Knowledge26, supplying explanations and request-status summaries in the workflow. Current product pages call its explanatory intelligence Clear View AI.

The company describes this intelligence as auditable and human-in-the-loop. That distinction matters when an approver wants to know why a permission exists or what has changed. An explanation can help a person judge the request. Its usefulness still rests on the quality of the underlying information and on someone taking responsibility for the decision.

06 / Copy the route, then buy the tool

The approach has a clear condition: ServiceNow must be a sensible home for the organization’s governance work. For a business without that platform, Clear Skye’s central advantage would require a broader platform decision. Even an existing customer needs reliable identity data, application owners, workable policies, and a team able to maintain the workflows. Familiarity helps people participate; it cannot decide who ought to have access.

A reader can borrow the method before buying anything. Follow one access request from start to finish. Count its handoffs. Name the owner of each decision. Test what happens when the employee changes jobs or leaves. Put the evidence where the people responsible can find it. Clear Skye’s interesting idea is that the location of governance belongs in the design brief. Security has enough complicated questions without making “where do I go?” one of them.