Identity Intelligence Platform for Security Operations

Q: How long does Icite take to deploy?

Minutes. Connect identity providers via OAuth or API key. Icite begins ingesting, normalizing to OCSF, resolving identities across providers, and producing posture findings immediately. No agents, no infrastructure changes, no parser development.

Icite vs SIEM: Why Identity Intelligence Beats General-Purpose Event Analytics

A SIEM ingests every log your environment produces. Icite ingests every identity signal your business runs on — and understands them. Security teams running identity investigations in a legacy SIEM spend hours joining events to lookup tables that should have been relational data in the first place. Icite replaces that patchwork with a purpose-built identity intelligence platform: three databases (time-series, relational SCD, graph), one query surface, and an AI security analyst that answers in plain English.

For executives: Consolidate identity investigation, posture, and response into a single tool. Eliminate identity-specific SOAR glue and give your identity and SOC teams a shared answer layer. Most Icite customers retire one to three identity-adjacent tools in the first quarter.

Hero summary

What a SIEM is (and what it's not)

A Security Information and Event Management platform is a general-purpose analytics engine for security logs. It ingests events from endpoints, networks, cloud platforms, applications, and identity providers. It indexes those events for full-text search, lets analysts write detection rules in a proprietary query language, and fires alerts when patterns match.

SIEMs were designed to answer questions about events: "What IP logged in at 3 a.m.?" "Was there a failed authentication spike on Tuesday?" "Show me all PowerShell executions on this host."

They were not designed to answer questions about identities: "Who has access to the Finance app across Okta, Entra, and AWS?" "What changed in this user's group memberships over the last 30 days?" "If this account is compromised, what is the blast radius across every provider?"

Those questions require relational configuration data — user records, groups, app assignments, MFA state, admin role history — and a graph that models how those entities connect. A SIEM holds none of that natively. It holds a flat stream of log events.

Where SIEMs fall short on identity

1. No native identity model. A SIEM does not know that jane.doe@corp.com in Okta, jane.doe@corp.onmicrosoft.com in Entra ID, and the IAM user jdoe in AWS are the same human. Analysts rebuild this with lookup tables and ad-hoc joins, and those tables drift the moment HR changes a last name or a provisioning workflow misfires.

2. No configuration state. SIEMs index what happened; they do not index what is currently true. "Who has admin access today?" is not a query a SIEM can answer without a sidecar CMDB, an IGA export, or a nightly job that hydrates a reference dataset. None of those are real-time, and all of them rot.

3. No graph. Blast radius is a graph problem: identity → group → group (nested) → application → permission → resource. A SIEM stores this as disconnected events. Walking it requires cartesian joins that time out on real datasets.

4. No temporal config history. "Did this user become an admin yesterday?" is a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD Type 2) question. SIEMs offer event-time indexing, not config-time versioning. The most common workaround — hourly config snapshots dumped into an index — cannot answer "what was true at 14:37 on Tuesday" with precision.

5. Query language tax. Proprietary SIEM query languages are skilled work. Every identity investigation becomes a query engineering exercise. Analysts context-switch between the SIEM, the IdP consoles, the HRIS, and the MDM dashboard — because no single pane answers the whole question.

6. Volume without value. Identity logs are high-volume and high-retention. Running them through a legacy SIEM that cannot use them to their full potential wastes the ingest and leaves the investigation work to the analyst.

How Icite is architecturally different

Icite was built as a converged identity intelligence platform from day one. A single Icite query can join four planes of data in one expression:

1. Time-series events (ClickHouse). OCSF-normalized audit logs from 19+ integrations. Sub-second queries across billions of events. The same raw material a SIEM would ingest — but normalized to a single identity-centric schema and co-located with the config and graph it needs.

2. Relational configuration state (PostgreSQL, SCD Type 2). Every user, group, application, device, and entitlement with valid_from / valid_to timestamps. Not a snapshot of "now" — the full trajectory of identity state, queryable at any point in time.

3. Identity relationship graph (Neo4j). Multi-hop traversals across SourceUser → Group → Application → Device → Policy → Permission → Scope, with temporal edges. This is how Icite answers "how did this person get access to this thing" and "what is the blast radius if they are compromised" in a single query.

4. Investigation corpus. Every inquiry the Icite AI Security Analyst has completed, with its tool calls, data retrieved, hypotheses tested, and findings. This plane is unique to Icite — the system learns from every investigation and turns findings into running detections.

A SIEM detection can only reason about plane 1. An Icite detection reasons about all four.

Side-by-side comparison

Capability

Legacy SIEM

Icite

Event ingest (identity)

Yes

OCSF normalization

Optional / manual

Native, automatic

Cross-provider identity resolution

Manual lookup tables

Canonical identity via email, backed by graph

Configuration state (current)

External (CMDB/IGA)

Native (SCD Type 2)

Configuration history (temporal)

Not supported

Native, timestamped

Identity graph

Not supported

Native (Neo4j)

Blast radius queries

Multi-tool workflow

Single query

Detection authoring

Proprietary query language

Plain English with AI agent (private beta)

Identity-specific posture scoring

CIS-style weighted model

Identity response actions

External SOAR

Native (isolate, revoke sessions)

Time-to-first-value

Weeks (onboarding, parsers, content)

Minutes (OAuth + API key)

Query time for identity investigation

Minutes to hours

Seconds

The consolidation math

A typical enterprise identity stack looks like:

A legacy SIEM for authentication event analysis
An incumbent ISPM point tool for posture assessment
A traditional ITDR point tool for authentication threat detection
Identity-specific SOAR playbooks or internal engineering to stitch these together
Per-IdP dashboards — real cost in analyst attention

Icite replaces three of those categories on day one and offsets the fourth (SOAR glue) by handling identity response natively. The teams that benefit:

SOC analysts stop context-switching between four consoles per investigation
Identity engineers get a single system of record for cross-provider state
IAM leaders get a posture score they can defend to the board with evidence
CISOs retire identity-adjacent tools and redirect that budget to coverage gaps

When to choose Icite over a SIEM

Choose Icite when your identity investigation latency is measured in hours, your identity data is spread across three or more providers, your SIEM volume is growing faster than the insight it produces, or your board is asking for an identity security program that cannot be answered by "we ship logs to the SIEM."

Keep your SIEM for what it is good at: cross-domain correlation across network, endpoint, and identity. Forward Icite detection findings (OCSF 1.3 Detection Finding objects) to the SIEM so the SOC sees identity threats in the same pane as everything else. You do not retire the SIEM to adopt Icite — you stop abusing the SIEM as an identity platform it was never designed to be.

FAQ

Does Icite replace a SIEM?
No. Icite replaces the identity-specific workloads a SIEM is poorly suited to run — cross-provider identity investigation, posture scoring, temporal change analysis, and identity threat detection. The SIEM remains the hub for cross-domain correlation across network, endpoint, and identity.

Can I send Icite findings to my existing SIEM?
Yes. Every Icite detection emits an OCSF 1.3 Detection Finding with severity, confidence, linked identities, linked applications, and MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques. These are natively consumable by any SIEM, SOAR, or ticketing system that accepts OCSF.

How long does Icite take to deploy?
Minutes. Connect your identity providers via OAuth or API key. Icite begins ingesting, normalizing to OCSF, resolving identities across providers, and producing posture findings immediately. No agents, no infrastructure changes, no parser development.

Does Icite handle non-human identities?
Yes. Service accounts, API tokens, OAuth service apps, Entra service principals, AWS IAM roles and assumed roles, and Google service accounts are all detected, classified, and tracked as part of the identity graph. See the NHI comparison page for detail.

What data stays in my environment?
Icite operates on metadata and audit events pulled through IdP APIs. No directory passwords, no session tokens. All data is tenant-isolated and encrypted in transit and at rest.