Behind the Build with RSA: Identity Resilience in the Age of AI
Behind the Build is an ongoing series spotlighting standout Microsoft partner collaborations. Each edition dives into the technical and strategic decisions that shape real-world integrations—highlighting engineering excellence, innovation, and the shared customer value created through partnership. RSA and Microsoft share a long, multiyear partnership shaped not by a single product or integration, but by shared customers grappling with some of today’s most complex security challenges, from cloud migration and identity sprawl to AI-driven threats. In this Behind the Build blog, we feature Dave Taku, RSA’s Vice President of Product Management and User Experience, to dive deeper into how that collaboration works at a technical level, how RSA and Microsoft engineers partner to solve real customer problems, and how recent work spanning Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Sentinel, and AI-driven security capabilities is shaping what comes next. Meet Dave Taku Dave Taku has spent nearly 25 years in cybersecurity, working across domains such as telecommunications and network security. But most of that time has been focused squarely on identity in areas like authentication, access management, governance and lifecycle, in particular. He’s been with RSA for two decades. When asked what makes a great VP of product, Dave describes his role as one centered on enablement. “My job is really to provide clarity and empower the team, to help them be successful.” That team-oriented mindset carries through RSA’s broader approach to engineering and partnerships. A Customer Driven Partnership with Microsoft RSA’s collaboration with Microsoft has largely been shaped by shared customers, many of them large, complex enterprises navigating the shift from on premises environments to cloud-first architectures. “These efforts are almost always customer initiated,” Dave notes. “Customers want us working together to make their journey successful.” That alignment has led to a wide range of joint initiatives over the years, spanning identity control planes, hybrid and multi cloud scenarios, and more recently, deeper analytics and AI driven security workflows. Identity as the Foundation Identity sits at the center of RSA’s partnership with Microsoft, particularly through integrations with Microsoft Entra. While organizations increasingly adopt Entra for cloud identity, many still operate complex hybrid estates and highly regulated environments. RSA can help in those mixed-use cases by extending identity controls beyond a single platform, providing behavioral analytics and risk-based authentication that complements Entra’s native features. “At RSA, we’re laser focused on answering two questions for our customers,” Dave explains. “Who is this user (can we be absolutely sure)? And is their access appropriate from a zero-trust perspective?” A standout example of Microsoft’s collaboration with RSA is their early adoption of External Authentication Methods (EAM), where they served as a day one launch partner. EAM built on prior generations of integration between RSA and Microsoft identity technologies and has been critical for customers migrating sensitive workloads to the cloud without disrupting existing security postures. At the end of the day, it is customers that drive this kind of innovation. Dave points to large, global, financial institutions as clear bellwethers. As these organizations shift toward cloud first models and embrace Azure and SaaS, they face the challenge of modernizing identity without disrupting environments long secured by RSA or introducing new risks during migration. EAM has been critical in enabling that transition, allowing established RSA authentication and policy controls to carry forward into Microsoft Entra so customers can adopt cloud services while preserving the security models and operational consistency they depend on. From Identity Signals to Agentic AI with Sentinel More recently, RSA and Microsoft have collaborated on deeper integrations with Microsoft Sentinel, including work with Sentinel data lake and Security Copilot. These efforts marked the first co-engineered agentic solution from RSA and Microsoft. RSA sees AI influencing identity security across several fronts: improving insights and automation, defending against AI-powered attacks, and securing non-human identities as autonomous agents become more common in enterprise environments. RSA’s approach starts with administrative telemetry from RSA ID Plus. Those events are ingested through a Sentinel connector and stored in the Microsoft Sentinel data lake which enables cost‑effective long‑term retention of identity telemetry, making it available for advanced analytics. Security Copilot agents then assess this data to surface anomalous or risky administrative behavior. “Admin accounts are increasingly a target,” says Dave. “If you don’t know when an admin is behaving unusually, you’re already too late.” This integration enables security teams to analyze identity related activity alongside broader organizational telemetry, helping analysts detect compromised credentials earlier and respond faster. “Human operators can’t keep up anymore,” Dave says. “As identities become more dynamic and more automated, we need AI driven assistance to maintain zero trust at scale.” Looking Ahead As RSA and Microsoft look ahead, their collaboration is increasingly shaped by how identity security must evolve in an AI driven world. Dave outlines three core areas where both teams see significant opportunities for continued innovation. AI will play a growing role in helping organizations make sense of increasingly fluid identity environments, enabling better insight, decision making, and, over time, more autonomous responses as manual oversight becomes less viable. At the same time, the rise of AI powered attacks is placing new strain on traditional identity trust models, pushing the industry toward more adaptive, analytics driven signals. Finally, as enterprises adopt AI agents that act independently or on behalf of users, identity security is expanding beyond humans altogether, making the protection of non-human identities an essential frontier for the future of cybersecurity. Programs like the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) help enable this kind of deep technical collaboration, providing a framework for RSA and Microsoft to align on emerging scenarios, validate integrations, and bring new capabilities to market faster. “It’s been a long journey together,” Dave reflects. “And we’re just getting started.”
