Gartner IAM 2024 Wrap Up

IAM conferences like Gartner are a great way to catch up on the latest industry trends and offerings, hear from customers how their IAM journey is day to day, and to catch up with colleagues and friends.  Ben Wise, VP Identity Management at IDMWORKS, shares his key takeaways:

1) Machine Identity

Machine Identity is here and is everywhere. There were 20+ sessions that dealt with Machine Identity. Recent surveys state that 70% of companies are now managing more non-human accounts than human accounts and that number is only growing with more SaaS applications, Micro-services, and integrated platforms. While I haven’t seen a consolidated and agreed-up definition of machine identity and the use cases for it, each vendor is bringing their own unique vision and use cases to the problem of machine identities.

2) Importance of Identity

The opening keynote from Gartner Analysts talked about the increasing significance and presence of IAM in the business. All business is now digital business and managing both the workforce and the customers requires IAM. IAM is increasingly a board-level conversation and the perils and breaches of not taking IAM seriously can be seen everyday on the evening news.  Though all is not doom and gloom.  IAM is enhancing and extending the capabilities and user experience to no longer just be a tactic to avoid compromise but a way to enable business functions and increase value to the organization.

4) Identity Verification  

We heard a lot about identity verification and identity proofing.  These use cases are becoming increasingly more complex as attackers use things like generative AI and deepfakes to try to fool traditional methods of verification.  This seems like a natural extension of authentication beyond just passwords and MFAs to real identity verification, whether it be for user onboarding and help desk verification or inline with authentication and access policy decisions.  As the channels and methods of access evolve, so do our needs for being able to really prove a user is who they say they are.

5) Common Challenges, Unique Solutions

IDMWORKS had the pleasure of speaking with one of our customers Balyor, Scott, and White.  Bill Willis from IDMWORKS and Kristin Hoppe from BSW talked about some of the challenges BSW is facing.  A lot of nodding heads in the room validated that many organizations are seeing the same challenges and hurdles.  It was great to share the lessons learned and the innovative solutions IDMWORKS and BSW have developed to address these universal challenges. 

6) Emerging IAM Players

Gartner is filled with market leaders like SailPoint, Ping, CyberArk, and Saviynt, but conferences like Gartner are also a great chance to get to see a number of new and emerging vendors and what the market has in the way of innovative technologies.  These companies will help shape the future of IAM offering innovative solutions by providing new use cases and solutions to help respond to the needs of organizations.  There are too many great organizations to mention, but a few that I was impressed with and had some great conversations were Grip Security, Lumos, Autharva , and Zilla .

7) Time to Value

Customers are looking for time to value with their investments in IAM.  Budgets are tight and waiting 12-18 months to see value from an IAM investment isn’t tenable.  With the rolling costs of subscription SaaS products, it’s more important than ever to start seeing value quickly with any new IAM product.  At IDMWORKS, we believe in a phase approach to deploying IAM products to allow for rapid time to value as well as reducing risk and adapting to changing requirements.  That model matches with what we’re hearing customers asking for.

8) IAM Community

One thing I’m always struck by is the sense that there’s a shared IAM community.  People are always willing to share their experiences, the success and the failures to help other organizations. My Gartner experience was filled with one off conversations in line, eating lunch, or waiting for an Uber that showed just how tight-knit a community  IAM really is.  People move from vendor to customer to integrator and back.  The community at large always seems willing to share their lessons learned and help others out.

9) Migration to the Cloud

Customers are still looking to move to the cloud and still finding it challenging.  The value and justifications are numerous.  From reduced infrastructure, to simplified operations, to new solutions with AI and ML, SaaS-based applications and solutions are the future of IAM.  Talking to customers has validated what we’ve always thought; there’s no magic bullet or easy button to migrate

to the cloud.  However, with the right partner like IDMWORKS with the migration experience and a proven migration methodology, migrating to the cloud isn’t as daunting and scary as going at it alone.

10) A final note for those frequent conference attendees… 

Theater sessions in the main conference hall have become a popular way to have smaller presentations and allow people to gain more information between the larger scheduled keynotes.  Having spoken in several of them myself, it’s a great way to briefly talk about a topic but given the size of the conference hall can often be hard to hear.  Gartner provided headsets linked to the presenter’s mic to ensure the speaker can be heard.  Great solution to maximize the time in the theater sessions.

Author: Ben Wise, IDMWORKS, VP Identity Management