A quarterly access review cannot govern something acting ten thousand times an hour.
Identity governance decides who holds standing access to an application and reviews it on a cycle. Agent governance decides each use of that access, at the moment of use. Both categories say governance; they are answering different questions.
The axis they differ on
Identity governance answers a question about standing: which identities hold access to which systems, is that access still appropriate, and who signed off. It is reviewed on a cycle, because the thing it governs changes on a cycle. People join, move and leave at human speed.
Agent governance answers a question about use: this agent holds access, and it is attempting this specific action, right now. Should it. That question cannot be answered quarterly. An agent granted access on Monday and reviewed in April takes several million actions in between, and the interesting one is somewhere in the middle.
Both controls are real. They sit at different points: one decides whether the door should be open at all, the other decides what happens each time something walks through it.
Where each of us sits
| SaaS management / IGA | Agentomy | |
|---|---|---|
| What is governed | Identities and their standing access to applications | Individual actions, as they are attempted |
| When the control applies | At joining, leaving, and on a review cycle | Every action, before it executes |
| Discovery of applications and shadow IT | Core strength, purpose-built discovery engines | Agent and framework discovery, not SaaS spend |
| Joiner, mover, leaver automation | Core strength, provisioning and deprovisioning at scale | Out of scope, this is a people process |
| Licence and spend optimization | Core strength, unused and duplicate subscriptions | Out of scope, we do not touch procurement |
| Access certification campaigns | Core strength, periodic reviews with attestations | Continuous, per action, no campaign to run |
| Per-action authorization decision | Grants standing access; the application decides each use | Tier-gated per action, server-side, escalation refused |
| Record of what an agent actually did | Access and provisioning events | Hash-linked decision record, stamped with the policy version in force |
| Halt everything in progress | Revoke access, effective on the next authentication | Kill switch across the fleet, effective immediately, survives restart |
| Behavioral drift and anomaly detection | Usage analytics and risk scoring | Per-agent baselines, 40 detectors, automatic quarantine |
| Prompt injection and message-level threats | Not the problem this category solves | Scanned on agent messages, refusal names the content |
| Reproducible public benchmark | Not published | GovernanceBench and VIGIL, open, run it yourself |
The left column describes a category rather than one vendor, and every entry in it is a strength drawn from how these products describe themselves. Where a row says out of scope, that is about us, not about them: we do not do procurement, spend or the joiner process, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to widen a table.
The gap opens where the identity is not a person
An identity governance platform can tell you that a service account exists, which application it reaches, and that somebody attested to it last quarter. That is useful and it is where its answer stops. It does not say what the thing behind that account did with the access on Tuesday afternoon.
When the holder of the credential is an autonomous agent, the distance between "has access" and "what it did" stops being an accounting detail and becomes the entire risk. The agent is fast, it is continuous, its behavior changes when the model or the prompt changes, and nothing about the quarterly attestation notices any of that.
That distance is what this platform occupies. Not instead of identity governance. After it.
A roster reviewed quarterly, or a decision made every time
An identity governance platform answers a question about the roster: what software is being paid for, who holds access to it, and whether that access was reviewed. It settles the question periodically, for identities.
Agentomy answers the question that arrives next, and answers it continuously: this agent holds that access and is using it right now, on this action. It authorizes the action before it executes, records the decision with the policy version it was made under, and halts the fleet on command. A roster reviewed in April cannot do that, and the agents are not waiting for April.
Most organizations that need this already have the roster covered. The gap is not who holds the credential. It is what the thing holding it did at three in the morning, and whether anything was in a position to stop it.
Run the benchmark against your own platform · See what the governance layer does
Sources and scope
- Zluri capabilities described here are drawn from published reviews of the product and from how the company describes itself: discovery of sanctioned and shadow applications, provisioning automation, access certification campaigns, licence optimization, and compliance reporting.
- The left-hand column generalises to the SaaS management and identity governance category. Individual vendors differ in coverage and depth, and a claim about the category is not a claim about any one product's roadmap.
- Nothing here asserts a capability is absent from a product we have not run. Rows that describe our side are shipped capabilities you can exercise against a running instance.