S9 E29: Overthrowing Shelf-Ware IGA and Engineering Engineering-Led Least-Privilege Frameworks with Umaimah Khan, Co-Founder & CEO of Opal Security
episodePreviously titled “S9 E29: Umaimah Khan , Opal Security” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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We are a security company, first and foremost. From day one, we have to build a lot of trust, and that has to show through in our features. So we made very specific choices on what we would prioritize from that perspective, such as being able to work in hybrid environments, because we knew that even as a small company, if we wanted to be the backbone of people's access management and least privilege infrastructure, that they needed to feel like they could manage us entirely and work in these complex environments. Another example of this is like building in our back end, our product itself, which is something that you will often see in like B2C or product-led companies gets left until way too late. I'm Umema Khan, also known as UK, the co-founder and CEO of Opal Security.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Who share what it takes to change an industry. Who built the teams that have their back. Keeping scalability top of mind. The stories you don't read in the headlines. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Codestory. I'm your host, Noah Labpart. And today, how Ume Makan decided to go out on her own and help organizations reduce access sprawl and enforce better security. This episode is sponsored by KiteWorks. Legacy managed file transfer tools lack proper security, putting sensitive data at risk. With KiteWorks MFT, companies can send automated or ad hoc files in a fully integrated, highly secure manner.
The solution is FedRAMP moderate authorized by the Department of Defense and has been so since 2017. Step into the future of secure managed file transfer with KiteWorks. Visit KiteWorks.com to get started. This episode is sponsored by ClearQuery. ClearQuery is the analytics for humans platform. With their full suite of features, you can go from data ingestion to automated insights seamlessly. With Ask ClearQuery, you can find valuable insights into your data using plain English. Don't miss the opportunity to simplify your data analytics with ClearQuery. Get started today at clearquery.io slash code story. Ume Makan, also known as U.K., grew up in San Diego but now lives in the Bay Area. A fun fact about her, she was homeschooled until college, and growing up, she loved puzzles and math. She planned to be a math professor until she eventually got into startups in tech. She's a curious person with many hobbies and interests. In fact, she loves to cook and was a chef at Michelin star restaurants. She also likes to garden, growing food and also interesting plants.
In the past, UK found herself drawn towards real world problems in real time. What she found herself noticing was that access management was incredibly messy and that people weren't willing to look behind the curtain to fix the problem. After she noticed that this problem kept surfacing, she then decided to solve it. This is the creation story of Opal Security.
So Opal Security is at the highest level. I like to think of it as an identity security platform. And what we really do is basically build the data layer and the workflows and then threat detection and response to actually understand who has access to what in your organization and how to calibrate that and eventually fully automate that in a way that actually scales with your work. I did more academic security in a past life. I studied some cryptography and I did a bunch of math and found myself repeatedly drawn to real world problems at the same time. I enjoyed the technical challenge, but then would have this desire to fix things that I saw happening in the real world. And one of those things was access management was this incredibly messy, fragmented issue at every scale.
tiny 10-person startups to open source to big government labs. And it just felt like a strange thing. It's clear that this matters. It's important. It's almost ignored until it's too late. And I think a huge part of that is because people aren't willing to look under the surface and ask themselves, how did we get here? A huge part of that is the reality of how businesses grow and how they scale.
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