access-governance
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The Five-Minute Window: Why P0 Security Wants Privilege to Expire
The old security bargain gave engineers broad access because emergencies could not wait. P0 Security is betting that the better bargain is privilege measured in minutes - for people, machines, and now AI agents.
Fischer Identity Turned Cybersecurity's Messiest Chore Into a No-Code Workflow
The Naples software company has spent two decades automating the work nobody notices until an ex-employee still has a login. Its wager: complex identity governance can be configured, audited and changed without years of custom code.
Varonis Is Betting the Company on One Idea: Protect the Data, Not the Perimeter
Two engineers built Varonis after a customer lost irreplaceable files and could not answer the simplest question: who touched them? Twenty-one years later, the company is forcing a second answer - security has to follow the data into SaaS, databases and AI, even when the migration hurts.
Rita Gurevich Built a Cybersecurity Company From the Mess Nobody Wanted to Clean Up
After Lehman Brothers collapsed, Rita Gurevich learned that the hardest technology problem was often the least glamorous: working out who owned what and who should have access. She turned that lesson into SPHERE, then spent eleven years bootstrapping before taking outside capital.
Veza
Veza is an identity security company that helps enterprises understand and control who can take what action on what data. Its patented Access Graph maps permissions across cloud platforms, SaaS apps, data systems, and infrastructure for human, machine, and AI identities, letting organizations enforce least privilege, automate access reviews, and govern non-human and AI-agent identities. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in the California Bay Area, Veza agreed to be acquired by ServiceNow in a deal announced December 2025.
Lightbeam
Lightbeam is a San Jose-based data security and privacy company that converges DSPM, privacy operations, and AI governance into one identity-centric platform. Founded in 2020 by ex-Nutanix engineers, it uses AI to discover, classify, and map sensitive data across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments, tying each data fragment back to the human it belongs to. Customers in banking, healthcare, insurance, and tech use Lightbeam to automate compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI while cutting data risk and controlling AI exposure through tools like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Google Gemini.
Howard Ting
Howard Ting is the CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity-security company building a unified control plane for access governance. He took the top job in November 2025 after more than five years running Cyberhaven and two-plus decades scaling category-defining security and enterprise-software companies including Palo Alto Networks, Nutanix, Redis, Zscaler, and RSA Security. A marketing-and-product operator who once demoed Azure Active Directory on stage with Bill Gates, Ting now bets that the hardest unsolved problem in security is authorization: deciding what any human, service, or AI agent should be allowed to do, and for how long.