Oktane 2026: BeyondID CEO Arun Shrestha on KeyData Cyber, AI agents, and the identity opportunity for MSPs

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Today, we continue our coverage of last week’s Okta Oktane conference in Las Vegas, and my guest has been part of the Okta story almost from the beginning. Arun Shrestha is co-founder and chief executive officer of BeyondID, one of fewer than three dozen Okta Apex partners worldwide – the top tier of Okta’s partner program – and a repeat Okta partner of the year. Arun was recruited by Okta’s co-founders back in 2012 to build out the company’s customer success and professional services organization, before striking out on his own to found BeyondID. Last year, BeyondID was acquired by KeyData Cyber, a Toronto-based identity security firm with deep Canadian federal government credentials, making the combined organization one of the largest pure-play identity security services firms in North America – and a lot more Canadian than your average Okta Apex partner. That matters for our audience, because Okta is accelerating the handoff of professional services to the channel, and every client of every MSP is starting to deploy AI agents that need identities of their own. We’ll talk about the KeyData combination, what Apex actually means for a partner, what Okta’s partner-first shift looks like from an Apex partner’s seat, and what MSPs should be doing about identity – including identity for AI agents – in the years ahead.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Arun Shrestha.

Robert Dutt: Arun, thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I know it’s probably a busy week here at Oktane.

Arun Shrestha: Pleased to be here, Rob, and very excited to be sharing a few thoughts on this.

Robert Dutt: Before we started recording, you shared a little bit of your journey, and I want to get into the elevator pitch for BeyondID. But before we even get into that, can you tell us about your long-standing history with Okta?

Arun Shrestha: Absolutely, pleasure to. Okta, to me, is like a passion and something you want to pursue in life. I found a North Star, which is Okta – what Okta’s done. I started my journey of 30-plus years back in San Francisco, in the space of technology, and I worked for many companies like Microsoft and Oracle. I was recruited by the co-founders of Okta to help build customer success and professional services back in 2012. 2012 was the year where nobody thought identity in the cloud was the normal thing, and I was brought on to help, in fact, one of the Fortune 500 customers of Okta – the first one – to help them migrate off of CA SiteMinder to Okta. That’s how my journey started. Along the way, I brought on many folks that I worked with in the past who believed in me to come join this small startup that was funded by a16z and others. I’m really glad that the co-founders found me, and I was able to be part of that journey. It’s been a phenomenal experience and journey for the last 15, 16 years.

Robert Dutt: And partway through that journey, you decided to not be part of Okta as an organization anymore, and you set up a partner organization. For those – especially our audience of MSPs and resellers who may not be familiar with BeyondID – can you give me the elevator pitch? What do you actually do, who do you do it for, that kind of thing?

Arun Shrestha: Absolutely. The name, by design, is BeyondID – it’s supposed to be: take the ID, and take the imagination to a different degree. What BeyondID does is really simplify the ways companies need to adopt modern technology and architectures around identity management, so they can move faster, connect with all technologies, and build very secure and resilient infrastructure for not only what’s today, but what’s in the future – including where we’re all heading, which is agentic.

Robert Dutt: You guys are one of less than three dozen Apex partners worldwide, the top tier of partners, and you’ve been partner of the year multiple times. For the uninitiated, what does Apex actually mean in practice for you as an organization, and why does it matter to customers?

Arun Shrestha: I think about this as a practitioner: any craft that you want to be absolutely the best at, you have to practice everything. One of the things Okta did in the early years – especially the last several years – is establish various tiers of partnership based on the merits of what partners have accomplished. The Apex partnership means not only that you’re able to materially help customers and make sure they’re successful; it’s actually helping Okta grow this business and spread Okta’s greatness across a lot of companies. It includes things like the experts who know Okta inside and out, and how we can really help companies navigate through very complex stuff into simplifying what Okta does best with the identity platform. And it also ties back to how many customers are successful over a period of time – we measure all of that. So if you achieve a couple of these critical metrics, you get to be Apex.

Robert Dutt: Last year you guys came together with KeyData Cyber out of Toronto, itself an identity security firm. How has that changed your go-to-market in Canada? Are you building out a stronger Canadian presence for the BeyondID side of things, or is it more about combining the capabilities across the board?

Arun Shrestha: A bit of many of the things you’ve just mentioned. I’ll tell you two or three basic theses of why the private equity firm that owns us actually decided that this would be the right merger. In Canada, KeyData has been around for over 20 years. They’re a well-established organization, they’ve done exceptionally well in the Canadian market, and they’re a well-known brand in Canada. But going to the US is a very different ball game, as you know. And then, Okta is obviously the biggest vendor in this space when it comes to the pure identity play and the US market. So we were looking at partnering and bringing in an organization that had a strong presence in the area that they are growing, but they need to grow faster, with Okta being that core play in the market in the US. We actually represented all of that. Prior to the acquisition, we had already done business with over 500 joint Okta customers, so that gives you the size and scale of what we’ve done and accomplished – and that goes back to the Fortune 10 companies down to the smallest company you can probably find. So it made sense for KeyData to make sure that there is a good merger of an organization that brings both the Canadian and US market – the North American market. I believe that for what we do, in a specialized market, we’re one of the largest in the space of what we do now. So it sort of remains BeyondID in the US market.

Robert Dutt: That’s correct. KeyData obviously has quite deep Canadian federal government credentials. Is there spillover between that and what you guys do, both in federal government stateside as well as enterprise and mid-market?

Arun Shrestha: Yes. Clearly, we play in various market segments, as well as industries – obviously government, as well as highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare services, federal government, state and local government. We offer services to all of those, and we have practices across those various segments, because we realize we need to specialize and understand the customer base in every industry, including federal government, in terms of what identity management could mean. So we’ve got those practices built out. BeyondID is a brand within KeyData Cyber that is solely focused on Okta.

Robert Dutt: For a Canadian MSP who’s listening to this – do you guys have a channel play? Is there an opportunity for co-delivery partners in Canada, or is it primarily a direct-to-enterprise kind of market for you guys, hand in hand with Okta?

Arun Shrestha: We’re probably one of those – I would call it a Swiss Army knife. Whatever we do, we want to make sure we are the organization of least friction. That means we want to be very flexible. We have multiple go-to-market approaches, including we are able to do advise, implement, and manage, in resale. We also have a set of IPs that complement the Okta platform. But if there are MSPs out there that are looking to partner who don’t necessarily have Okta as a core focus, we also partner with them. Today, here in the US, we partner with many large VARs like SHI, CDW, Carahsoft, World Wide Technology – all of those. So whatever you believe is best for us and Okta combined to go to market, where we can remove friction and help these customers.

Robert Dutt: Is there a dominant way that looks? Is it sort of tag-you-in, deal-by-deal kind of thing, or what does the relationship look like when you’re partnering with a large VAR?

Arun Shrestha: Great question, and it’s been strategic as well as tactical. One of the ways we’ve really figured out how to help is, a lot of times, to go with whatever the Okta sales organizations want to do to get to the finish line of getting the contract in place. So oftentimes a lot of our business is direct business. We also do business with Okta Professional Services, with Okta bringing in our resources to help companies, because that requires less master services agreement work with customers – they don’t have to go through all the legalities and everything. But we also go through value-added resellers. More than 20, 30 percent of our business is through the reselling channel as well.

Robert Dutt: Okta announced earlier this year that it’s accelerating the transition of professional services in the direction of folks like yourselves and other folks in their channel community. From my understanding, as an Apex partner, you’re effectively becoming Okta’s implementation and managed services arm even more than in the past. I’m curious – now that we’re pretty much six months into that – what does that look like from your seat as an Apex partner, in terms of how you go to market with Okta?

Arun Shrestha: This really ties back to the macroeconomic situation first. There’s so much of a market opportunity that Okta has, as a pure identity play – it’s a unified security fabric now, with AI agents on top. The opportunity is grand, and I think Okta is at the right place at the right time to have the right go-to-market strategy, to open this up to partners like us. Just look at most mature IT vendors or platform providers like Amazon and Microsoft of the world – very robust partner ecosystems. Okta is following a similar playbook here, and I believe it’s on the right track to do wonderful things.

Robert Dutt: For Canadian resellers or MSPs who think, “I hear a lot about identity, my customers are asking about it, but it’s really not my thing – that’s sort of a big enterprise consultant thing” – what’s the business case for why they should care about identity as a practice area? Is there opportunity? Is there margin there?

Arun Shrestha: Identity sits at the juxtaposition of multiple things happening in the industry. It’s probably one of the most misunderstood areas of technology, because we think: okay, you’ve got to log in, you’ve got to need an MFA, and you’re done. Every application can build that. But you’re starting to get into a world where you’re literally building all of these applications, integrating with every application, every kind of user – partner, customer, employee, contractor, whatnot – all of a sudden it becomes fairly complex. And identity is not only important from a security posture point of view; it’s also a means of how you drive higher productivity, drive a higher level of better user experience, and risk management, mitigation, and compliance. You see an example of Palo Alto Networks acquiring CyberArk, which is a good example of where they realized you can’t just be in the traditional network space; you have to get into IoT and IT and devices and service accounts – that’s identity. You’re seeing that consolidation happening. You can see Microsoft also very deeply involved in this space with Entra and what they’re doing. And I think, from Okta’s point of view, it’s uniquely positioned because it’s very platform-neutral – it integrates with Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, you name it, all the different platforms. Any MSPs and SIs that are looking to this side have to look at identity as one of the key pillars in how they build their practices to grow their business.

Robert Dutt: At the same time, you touch on some of the AI players – there’s certainly non-human identity, which has become a huge thing and is getting some attention, not necessarily by that name yet, but it’s a big factor in some of the big news stories of the summer and early fall. How has that changed the nature of the conversation – what customers are coming to you asking for, or asking about, that sort of thing?

Arun Shrestha: Just like back in 2012 when I joined Okta, cloud was the biggest thing. AI has become the biggest tailwind for identity as an industry. Everybody talks about the most recent narrative: “Oh my God, this is so scary, we humans are going to be eliminated because of AI.” Those are all the fears out there. And what you saw with some of the hacks that happened with others – Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic – what you’re starting to see there is a pattern. The pattern basically says: if you don’t control what you’re deploying, you are getting into trouble. So how do you control it? Just like humans, AI agents also have to have identity. If you have identity, then you can actually control the plane more effectively. That’s really key. I think the industry has realized it – the stock market is an indicator of what happens. You’re starting to see the playbook concepts shift from “Anthropic is going to take over” to now “oh, maybe some of the infrastructure players are going to be very critical for this.” And Okta is a really integral part of it – not just Okta, but across the board for identity players.

Robert Dutt: Okta for AI agents launched earlier this year, and every MSP I talk to is experimenting with AI tools on behalf of their clients, while clients who are experimenting with AI tools don’t know that identity for an AI agent is keeping pace with that – maybe it’s a lagging indicator. Can you make that concrete? If I’m an MSP, and my customers are playing with some of these tools, what’s the risk that I’m not seeing?

Arun Shrestha: That’s basically what happened with the Hugging Face-to-OpenAI breach – that’s a perfect example. If you let the agents go out and do whatever they want to do, that’s what’s going to happen: there were no guardrails in place. One of the things identity can do is, if you know how to discover or detect where the agents are, and you’re able to say, “You are a registered agent that is supposed to do X, Y, and Z,” and control what they’re authorized to do once they are deployed – what are they able to do – and have sort of performance reviews, just like the humans. Humans have the whole process of hiring, onboarding, going through working on specific tasks to get trained, and they basically get the performance review over time – see how they’re doing, whether they get promoted or get fired. All of that happens. I think it’s no different in the world of AI. You have to really take that seriously. We see that oftentimes, where companies are deploying AI agents and then realize there are some issues happening. So the CISOs of the world, CIOs and CTOs of the world who are really on top of this have to basically say, “I’m going to give you a very simple recipe book or a couple of pages to say this is how you go deploy AI agents.” And they can do that – regardless, now you can go fast. I think that’s really where the realization has to come. And it’s one other opportunity for the economic buyer – the CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs – to be able to be on the good side, to basically say, “We’re the enabler for the companies to go faster with AI.”

Robert Dutt: BeyondID describes itself as a managed identity solutions provider, which sounds to me like an identity MSP, essentially. A lot of MSPs have endpoint, have backup, maybe MDR, some security – identity is still a bit of an afterthought. Is the goal that – you described sort of the Swiss Army knife approach – MSPs partner with you, or they eventually bring identity in-house and kind of tag you guys in where that’s necessary or where it’s above their level?

Arun Shrestha: I will start with customer first: what does the customer want? The customer wants a very established organization with a very mature security posture – for instance, they already have a security operations center, and within security operations they have a group of people that specialize in identity. But that’s not the luxury of every company. Every company is in a different setup, at a different stage of maturity. So what you just talked about – whether this is something that should be subscribed to or built on your own – it’s both. And we want to be able to provide services across that range, from “Hey, I need a couple of people that know how to do this to be part of my organization” all the way to “help me run everything for me.” You will also see that sometimes the service desk – whether it’s reactive, proactive, or incident response that you’re dealing with – a lot of that level one support can address the basic stuff, like network and access and stuff like that. But when it gets to more complex issues, they need a subject matter expert. So many of our customers actually leverage us on level two and level three support, versus level one. That’s another way of leveraging us. So you don’t necessarily have to go build all of this capacity overnight, but you can rely on us to actually do everything from advising, implementing, running and operating, and monitoring all of that.

Robert Dutt: On that operating side, you guys have a pretty slick little Identity Command Center that’s powered by AI, does a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, definitely helps with scale, I have to imagine. Is that technology white-labeled to partners, or strictly internal – or how do your partners, when you’re working with an MSP, interact with that?

Arun Shrestha: It’s designed to be very customer- and partner-friendly. That means we can leverage it for direct customer uses, or if a partner wants to white-label it, we’re hoping to do that too. What we want to do is make sure that the engine behind the ICC is available to our partners or customers.

Robert Dutt: We’re here at Oktane – it’s just getting started. What’s your wish list for what Okta is talking about and announcing here this week, and what’s the realistic line that you think you’ll likely see?

Arun Shrestha: I would say that if Okta can accomplish this week [the message] that identity is really a core part of what companies have to think about as they start to go into an agentic world – that identity is really a critical part of that equation – I think Oktane has accomplished well. And that will help everybody: the customers on board, prospects on board, partners on board. Now we know why we need to do this. We know what needs to be done. Now let’s go do it with how it needs to be done. So that’s where the play is – not just from an SI and MSP, but also technology partners, like Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Google – they’re all here. We’re all trying to solve the same thing at the end of the day, to help companies really engage in a very productive way to drive the transformation they’re looking for, and to make AI not the one that takes care of humanity, or gets rid of it, but to a place where humanity is better because of AI.

Robert Dutt: If you’re advising an MSP – especially a smaller MSP – on strategy around identity for the next 12 months, and they’re starting from a baseline of understanding but not all that active, what’s one thing they should definitely do, and one thing they should stop doing or avoid doing?

Arun Shrestha: The MSP space is so wide. You have to be very focused on picking one or two areas you can be really, really good at – whether it’s networks, data security, or identity security, you have to pick one and be really good at it. And there are multiple platform players out there, so you have to choose who you want to start with. That was really the thesis behind BeyondID too: we had the choice to do many things with many other providers as well, but we decided to partner with Okta. I would say pick a platform – hopefully they’ll pick Okta or one of the top players – and start there. The space is big enough that if they keep going deeper and expanding their capacity, capability, and expertise there, they’ll do well. And once you’ve done that, you go to the next one. The flip side of that is you don’t want to do everything to everybody. It dilutes you, and you don’t know what you stand for. You have to really know what’s your product, what’s the product-market fit, what market segment you’re going to. That’s the other piece. If you’re starting early, unless you have a couple of big anchor customers you’re going to work with, you start small and you start with the SMB market, and you move your way up as you start to mature your service offers.

Robert Dutt: Learn as you go.

Arun Shrestha: Yes.

Robert Dutt: You’ve used the word ecosystem, and certainly the industry increasingly looks at partnerships as that ecosystem type of model. I’m curious if you have any common threads, especially when you’re working with VARs or MSPs, that make for a good fit for a partner with BeyondID?

Arun Shrestha: Based on our experiences over the last several years – and I think even prior to that, I was responsible for bringing many of the VARs and MSPs into the Okta ecosystem, so I’ve had enough years of seeing what plays well and what doesn’t – it’s very tempting, and Okta has gone through a lot of iterations of its partner ecosystem as well, which we’re all aware of. But I think Okta has definitely done one thing exceptionally well. I had the pleasure to work with Todd McKinnon of the Okta organization for many years, and he’s very, very focused on one thing: to help customers achieve what they need to achieve. Many other vendors, they all say they care about customers, but I’ve seen Todd operate at a very different level. In fact, even Jim Cramer, who was on CNBC, said he has amazing focus and attention. So something I would say for MSPs and resellers out there: focus on this and say, if you’re really serious about it, go build – believe in the vision, believe in the market space, build a team around it. And if you have an excellent team, an excellent market space, and an excellent product, you’ve got a formula to do amazing things.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me: what’s the biggest untapped or under-realized opportunity around identity right now? Maybe the thing that, if we come together again at Oktane 2027, will be the keynote subject, but isn’t today.

Arun Shrestha: One thing we run into a lot is: this is a time to be bold. It’s not time to lay back or be afraid. Nobody knows where five years ahead is going to be – even a year is very hard to predict. But I think you have to jump with both feet and say that AI is here to stay, and identity is going to be a very critical component of that infrastructure. It’s going to be critical for every organization to figure out how to do it. I would be very surprised if, next year, we come back and say, “Well, we tried to deploy a lot of AI agents, but there were no identities tied to them.” That would be a huge failure. But if you say, “Oh my God, every AI agent we’ve got is under control – we know exactly who gets deployed, how it gets deployed – and if the agent’s going rogue, we know how to shut it down,” just like the employees: if they misbehave, you’re out the door. Same with AI agents.

Robert Dutt: That’s the dream, right? Arun, I appreciate the time. Thank you once again.

Arun Shrestha: Thank you, Rob. Thank you for the time with me. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it: Arun Shrestha, co-founder and chief executive officer of BeyondID, a KeyData Cyber company. I’d like to thank Arun for his time – no small thing in the middle of a busy Oktane week – and thank you, as always, for listening.

Three things I took away from this one. First, the KeyData-BeyondID combination is a rare Canadian-led play at the top of a major vendor’s partner program, and Arun is explicitly open to partnering with Canadian MSPs and resellers rather than competing with them. Second, Okta’s professional services transition is following the Microsoft and Amazon partner ecosystem playbook, and with 20 to 30 percent of BeyondID’s business already flowing through the reseller channel, the co-delivery lane is real. And third, on AI agents: treat them like employees. Onboard them, review them, be ready to fire them – because if every agent your clients deploy doesn’t have an identity a year from now, Arun would call that a failure.

If you haven‘t already, please follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most directories, and while you’re there, ratings and reviews are always appreciated and help other folks in the channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.