Authors / Sawyer Pence
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Sawyer Pence

Principal Solutions Architect at Strata Identity

About:

Sawyer Pence is a Principal Solutions Architect at Strata Identity, where he serves as a technical authority on identity orchestration, continuity, and AI-driven security across some of the company’s most strategic customer engagements. He works at the intersection of field engineering, product, and go-to-market, designing deployment architectures, leading live demos, and translating complex identity challenges into actionable solutions for Fortune 500 enterprises, global financial institutions, and U.S. public-sector organizations.

At Strata, Sawyer has architected identity continuity solutions for major aerospace manufacturers, Fortune 100 financial services firms, global management consultancies, federal credit unions, and top-tier defense contractors. His ability to bridge deep technical fluency with clear communication has earned him a reputation as a trusted advisor with both enterprise architects and C-suite decision-makers.

Beyond customer work, Sawyer is an active contributor to the Strata engineering ecosystem. He submits code to the Maverics orchestrator-blueprints repository, builds demo environments from scratch, writes service extensions, and collaborates directly with engineering on product feedback. He has briefed Gartner analysts on agentic identity and MCP security, and is a published author on the Maverics.ai developer blog.

 

Specialization:

Sawyer Pence specializes in designing and delivering identity orchestration architectures that solve the hardest problems enterprises face today: failover between cloud and on-prem identity providers, securing AI agent workflows at the network boundary, and modernizing legacy authentication without rewriting applications. He brings hands-on engineering depth to every customer conversation, which means solutions are grounded in what actually works in production.

 

Education:

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

 

Accomplishments

  • Designed and delivered identity failover architectures for major enterprises spanning aerospace, financial services, higher education, and management consulting, enabling seamless authentication continuity during IDP outages across Entra ID, Active Directory, PingFederate, and Okta environments
  • Key contributor to Strata’s AI Identity Gateway strategy; provided competitive intelligence that shaped go-to-market positioning, built the GoClaw security controls demo, and briefed Gartner analysts on securing SaaS-hosted remote MCP servers in the enterprise
  • Led technical delivery for Department of Defense use cases including the Nomad ID demo and TAK server integration with Maverics, demonstrating identity orchestration in denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited connectivity environments for defense contractors and coalition partner scenarios
  • Built Strata’s continuity “Gold Demo” environment end-to-end, contributed PRs to the orchestrator-blueprints repository, authored Maverics service extensions, and created demo architectures used across the sales organization, from industry conference engagements to Fortune 100 proof-of-concept working sessions
  • Published author on the Maverics.ai developer blog
  • Briefed Gartner analysts on agentic identity and MCP security

The latest from Sawyer Pence

Identity Continuity
Identity Continuity for Epic EHR

How Strata Maverics keeps clinicians logged in to Epic when your identity provider goes down. Strata Maverics sits between Epic and your identity providers, so Epic...

Agentic Identity
I Gave 4 AI Agents a Corporate Bank Account. Here’s How I Stopped Them From Draining It.

A technical build log of the Multi-Agent Control Room, where AI agents pay invoices, escalate denials, and every action is identity-governed through OPA policies, RFC 8693...

Identity Continuity
Zero Trust in the dark – securing missions when the network goes down

The promise of Zero Trust is simple: never trust, always verify. But what happens when the very systems you rely on to verify identities are suddenly...

Identity Continuity
The new front line of digital resilience — Why DDIL is everyone’s problem

Not all downtime is the same. There’s an important distinction between planned outages and unplanned disruptions — and both require different approaches to resilience.

Videos
Securing Shared Services Applications

Some applications at the center of every large organization actually sit at the boundaries between mixed user populations — think employees, partners, contractors, vendors, and even machines. These shared services applications keep the business running through a combination of fragile custom code and mixed vendor environments.

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