Marc Jordan
VP of Product, SGNL
Oct 20, 2025
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The guide to making Continuous Identity real in GitHub

Discover how to protect your source code with Continuous Identity by connecting GitHub to your existing stack—Okta, Jira, and device management—so developers get just-in-time access tied to actual work, not standing permissions.

Every engineer knows GitHub is more than a version control system. It’s where business logic lives, where production code is shaped, and where risks can quietly snowball into breaches.

That makes GitHub a crown jewel for attackers. But unfortunately, most organizations still treat it like just another SaaS app.

What’s the problem?

In most environments:

  • Developers and service accounts have long-lived access to sensitive repos
  • Access isn’t tied to actual work being done; no ticket, no justification, no checks
  • Privileges linger long after they’re needed
  • Auditing and cleanup are manual, error-prone, and often incomplete

And despite the IAM stack you’ve built—Okta for identity, Jira or ServiceNow for tickets, Jamf or Kandji for device posture—you’re still left trying to duct-tape these tools together into something that resembles modern access control.

That’s the gap SGNL was built to close.

Real-time access, right when it’s needed

SGNL brings Continuous Identity to GitHub. That means:

  • Access is granted only when the user’s context justifies it
  • Access is revoked immediately when that context changes
  • Policies are human-readable, machine-enforced, and business-aligned

No standing roles. No “set and forget” permissions. Just access that reflects what’s actually happening—who’s doing what, why, and with what risk.

A new GitHub Deployment Guide—written for reality

We just published a new Deployment Guide for GitHub to show what it looks like to protect your code with SGNL. It’s not a training manual. It’s not just a glossy use case.

It’s a 25,000-foot view of how to make this work, based on real deployments.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

  • Why traditional GitHub access models fall short
  • What Zero Standing Privilege looks like in a developer platform
  • How SGNL evaluates identity, ticketing, and device context in real time
  • The systems you’ll likely need (and where we plug in)
  • What a typical deployment flow looks like—from ingest to enforcement

If you’re ready to go deeper, the guide links out to our product documentation for step-by-step configuration help.

Want to protect GitHub? You’ll want GitHub data.

One heads-up: to protect GitHub, you’ll also want to ingest it as a System of Record. That lets SGNL pull in org structures, user roles, and repo ownership so policies can reflect the way your teams actually work.

We’ve got you covered there too. Here’s how to ingest GitHub data as a System of Record.

This is what Continuous Identity looks like

At SGNL, we talk a lot about replacing roles with reason. With GitHub, that means:

  • Developers can push code when it’s tied to an open issue
  • Automation can deploy from protected branches with a valid trigger
  • And no one hangs onto permissions “just in case”

Continuous Identity isn’t just about control, it’s about confidence. Confidence that your source code is protected, that your audits are clean, and that you’re not trading velocity for visibility.

Start here → Read the GitHub Deployment Guide

Or get in touch to see how it works in your environment.

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