BalkanID Embraces MCP: Pioneering Agentic Identity Security and Access Governance

Agentic security has quickly moved from concept to concrete design pattern. Intelligent agents now have the power to autonomously detect risks and coordinate responses across the modern enterprise. By adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) across both our platform endpoints and the BalkanID Copilot, BalkanID is making it easier than ever for agents to invoke identity functions and orchestrate third-party actions—all through a unified, flexible control surface. MCP’s standardized approach lays the groundwork for responsive, policy-driven remediation and truly autonomous security workflows.

What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where your data and actions live. In simple terms, MCP lets AI-driven tools (like BalkanID’s Copilot or other agents) communicate with external applications through a common language. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications – it provides a standardized way to plug AI models into different data sources and services. Instead of building one-off integrations for every system or API, developers can rely on MCP’s universal interface to invoke functions, fetch data, or trigger actions in a consistent, secure manner.

Why is this relevant to identity security? Identity systems are rich in data (users, roles, privileges) and pivotal actions (managing accounts, enforcing policies). Traditionally, tying an AI or automation tool into an identity platform meant custom APIs and brittle scripts – every new integration was a heavy lift. MCP changes that. By standardizing how AI agents “talk” to identity and security tools, MCP makes it far easier to orchestrate identity-driven workflows across your stack. In short, MCP is the bridge between AI and identity: it breaks down data silos and replaces fragmented point-to-point connectors with one open protocol, ensuring AI-driven security solutions have seamless, two-way access to identity context and controls.

Dual Integration: BalkanID + MCP on Two Fronts

With this announcement, BalkanID is introducing MCP support in a dual-pronged manner:

• BalkanID as an MCP Server (Open Platform Endpoints): All of BalkanID’s core platform capabilities can now be exposed via MCP to third-party AI agents. In practice, this means you can connect any MCP-compatible agent or orchestration tool to BalkanID as an MCP server and immediately leverage BalkanID’s identity security functions through a standard interface. Instead of calling BalkanID’s REST APIs directly or writing custom code, an external AI assistant can use MCP to securely perform actions on BalkanID. For example, a security chatbot could call BalkanID (over MCP) to retrieve a list of risky users, initiate an access review campaign, or deprovision a user’s access – all through simple function calls standardized by MCP. By exposing our platform via MCP, we can make it plug-and-play for AI orchestration systems (from LLM-based assistants to SOAR platforms) to include identity intelligence and controls in their workflows.
• BalkanID Copilot with Third-Party MCP Plugins: Our own AI assistant, BalkanID Copilot, now speaks MCP as well – not just as a server, but as a client that can integrate external tools. BalkanID Copilot can be extended with third-party MCP “plugins” to execute steps on other systems as part of its workflows. In essence, Copilot can now orchestrate complex, multi-system tasks by invoking external MCP servers. This is a game-changer for building end-to-end security playbooks. For instance, you could attach a Jira MCP connector to Copilot, allowing it to create or update tickets in a Jira risk register, thus automating your identity governance process. Or integrate an MCP-enabled Slack module so Copilot can send a user a Slack message to review an access request. The Copilot’s logic and natural language interface remain the same, but behind the scenes it can fan out actions to many systems via MCP – all in one cohesive sequence. This plug-and-play architecture turns BalkanID Copilot into a central orchestrator agent, capable of weaving identity actions together with IT and security actions across your environment.

Flowchart 1: Dual-pronged MCP integration showing how external AI agents call BalkanID as a server, and how BalkanID Copilot acts as a client to call external systems.

By supporting both roles – MCP server (for others to call BalkanID) and MCP client (for BalkanID to call others) – we ensure maximum flexibility. Whether you want an external AI brain to autonomously leverage BalkanID, or you want BalkanID’s AI to autonomously leverage external tools, the foundation is now set. And because it’s all based on an open standard, it’s secure and future-proof – any system that speaks MCP can slot in without custom integration code.

New Autonomous Workflows Unlocked by MCP

What does this enable in practice? Here are some key examples of how MCP supercharges identity security workflows with autonomy and speed:

• Automated Identity Actions (No Human in the Loop): With MCP, autonomous agents can directly invoke BalkanID actions in response to triggers. For example, if BalkanID’s Identity Risk Analyzer flags a user with toxic permission combinations, an AI agent (via MCP) could immediately launch a targeted access review campaign or revoke an unnecessary access entitlement – no waiting for a person to kick off the process. Similarly, a joiner, mover, or leaver event from an HR system can trigger a workflow engine to call BalkanID via MCP, ensuring that relevant access is provisioned or de-provisioned across all supported applications in one step, and that access is always least privileged and appropriate to each job role. This kind of closed-loop automation was possible before via our API, but MCP takes it one step forward and makes it simpler and safer for any AI to do it in a standardized way. The benefit is faster remediation of risks (minutes instead of weeks) and assurance that identity governance keeps up with real-world changes.
• Seamless Ticketing & ITSM Integration: Many identity governance processes require creating tickets or records in IT systems (for audit tracking or to involve the right people). BalkanID Copilot’s new MCP integrations make this frictionless. Using a third-party MCP plugin for a ticketing system, Copilot can automatically open an incident or request ticket as part of an automated playbook. For instance, when a high-risk privilege is detected and removed, Copilot might post an update to Jira including what was done and why, so IT and application owners are looped in. This replaces the old way of sending emails or expecting someone to manually create tickets. Now, the AI agent handles it in real time. The result is unified record-keeping and collaboration: identity events seamlessly generate the necessary paper trail in external systems via MCP calls. Your teams stay informed without the AI being limited to the BalkanID silo.
• Stitched Multi-System Workflows: The true power of MCP is in orchestrating multi-step responses across multiple platforms. BalkanID already provides Playbooks to automate identity tasks (e.g. suspend dormant accounts, revoke orphaned access, etc.), and our underlying identity knowledge graph gives Copilot a 360° view of users, roles, and access relationships. Now, with MCP, those playbooks can extend their reach. An AI-driven playbook can take a finding in BalkanID and escalate it through multiple systems automatically. Consider a Segregation-of-Duties violation identified by BalkanID: a playbook could not only remediate the violation within BalkanID (e.g. remove an excessive role) but also call an MCP-enabled HR system to update the user’s status, and then notify the security team on Slack – all within seconds. MCP essentially lets BalkanID’s intelligence coordinate any tool or app that has an MCP interface. It’s a bit like giving BalkanID arms and legs in other environments – the ability to reach out and execute tasks beyond its native functions. This greatly amplifies the impact of our identity insights, turning them directly into cross-platform actions.

To make this more tangible, let’s walk through a concrete scenario that would have been complex and slow without MCP, but is now streamlined and autonomous:

Use Case: Enforcing MFA and Suspending Privileged Access (in Real Time)

Imagine BalkanID’s risk analytics identify a user account exhibiting unusual behavior. The user happens to have high privileges on a critical system and, alarmingly, has not enrolled in multi-factor authentication. Normally, this kind of situation would trigger a flurry of emails and manual steps. With MCP-driven automation, BalkanID Copilot can remediate rapidly once the user approves:

1. Risk Detection: BalkanID flags the user as high-risk (e.g., due to a privileged access finding combined with no MFA enabled). This alert prompts Copilot to suggest a Playbook action for the user to review.
2. Enforce MFA via IdP (Identity Provider): After the user approves, Copilot—using an MCP plugin for the company’s SSO/IdP (say an Okta or Azure AD MCP server)—updates the user’s policy to require MFA on the next login. The agent essentially calls the IdP’s API through MCP to turn on MFA enforcement for that account. Within seconds of approval, the user’s account is protected by a login challenge, drastically reducing the chance of compromise.
3. Suspend Privileged Access: The Copilot queries the BalkanID knowledge graph to retrieve the privileged connections that the problematic identity has access to, and interacts with the identity provider via an MCP to temporarily suspend the identity, or temporarily deprovision privileged roles. For example, if the user had administrative access in AWS, Copilot could invoke an MCP action to disable that IAM role. This ensures that until the user has enabled MFA for that identity, any potential risk of unauthorised access to privileged accesses is mitigated.
4. Ticketing & Notifications: Finally, Copilot creates a Jira ticket (via a Jira MCP integration) documenting the actions taken—“MFA enforced and admin access suspended for user X due to risk alert”—and pings the security team’s Slack channel through an MCP-connected Slack bot. Users whose privileged access has been de-provisioned as a result of this policy violation can be notified directly with an explanation. They will receive instructions to set up MFA for the affected identities and guidance on how to request the reinstatement of their privileged access. Everyone gets real-time visibility into the incident and can follow up; importantly, the critical enforcement happens only after user approval.

Flowchart 2: Step-by-step remediation flow—from detection through user approval to automated enforcement, suspension, ticketing, and user notification—all via standardized MCP calls.

What used to require coordination across identity, security, and IT teams is now handled—almost entirely—within seconds of a single approval. The MCP-enabled agent acts as a digital first responder: it saw the risk, used identity context (from BalkanID’s knowledge graph) to decide on a course, and executed a multi-system mitigation plan end-to-end. This is the promise of agentic security—and it’s here today. Notably, all the steps above are orchestrated through standardized MCP calls. There’s no brittle scripting or hard-coding; the same Playbook could work across different vendors and tools, as long as they support MCP.

The outcome: real-time, AI-driven remediation—initiated and approved by the user—that contains threats before they escalate, with audit trails automatically captured. Your identity security stance becomes not only preventive but proactive.

Real-Time, Autonomous Identity Security Remediation

Stepping back, the introduction of MCP support elevates BalkanID into a central player in the agentic security ecosystem. By enabling real-time interactions between AI agents and identity infrastructure, we’re breaking down the traditional barriers between siloed security tools. An intelligent agent can now maintain constant context across systems – it knows what’s happening in your IAM platform, your ITSM tickets, and your cloud apps simultaneously, and can act across all of them in concert. This leads to a few big-picture advantages:

• Faster Response to Risk: When every second counts, having an AI Copilot that can enforce controls instantly on user approval dramatically cuts down mean-time-to-remediation. Threats like privilege misuse or account takeovers can be throttled on-demand. MCP ensures the AI has the access it needs to act broadly and quickly.
• Consistent Orchestration: MCP provides the consistency needed to trust an autonomous system. Because it standardizes how tools are invoked, there’s less room for error compared to custom scripts. Security engineers can define policies and playbooks in BalkanID, and know that via MCP, the execution across various apps will follow those instructions predictably. The protocol’s two-way communication also means the agent gets feedback from each system (success/failure responses), allowing for verification or rollback if needed – a critical aspect for safe automation.
• Unified Identity & Security Posture: Perhaps most importantly for CISOs, MCP support means your identity security processes no longer operate in a vacuum. They are now woven into the broader fabric of IT and security operations. The AI-driven decisions in BalkanID (e.g. who is high-risk, what access should be removed) can immediately propagate to enforcement points (like IdPs, PAM solutions) and to oversight channels (like ITSM, logging systems). This unification reduces gaps in coverage. Compliance and security controls remain in sync – for example, if BalkanID’s governance policy says a user’s access is revoked, you can be confident it’s revoked everywhere, and everyone who needs to know has been notified. MCP is the glue that binds identity, security, and IT into one responsive system.

Availability

BalkanID’s MCP integration will be available as part of our Copilot Enterprise offering. This capability is bundled for customers who opt for our advanced modules such as the Identity Risk Analyzer, User Access Reviews, or Lifecycle Management suites.