Last week, the AuthMind team attended the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit 2024 in Grapevine, TX. The event included thought-provoking discussions among identity and security leaders, and in-depth market analysis from Gartner analysts. As organizations grapple with identity sprawl and the complexities of identity management and protection, we believe the Gartner Summit proved essential for navigating the industry's challenges and opportunities.
In this blog post, we will highlight the key themes that stood out to us at the event.
Among several prominent themes, in our opinion, one particularly resonated throughout the three days of discussions: identity observability. Building upon traditional visibility—which provides a crucial snapshot of the identity infrastructure—observability offers vital insights into activities across the identity infrastructure, bridging gaps between different environments and silos. Furthermore, it embodies the promise of the three Cs: Consistent, Context-Aware, and Continuous.
Identity observability not only delivers much-needed insights into what is happening across the identity infrastructure but also helps explain why it occurs and how it can be effectively managed. By enabling real-time dynamic contextual monitoring and analysis of all identity-related activities and access paths, observability becomes an indispensable element of robust identity security, enhancing threat detection and response operations.
At AuthMind, we have witnessed identity observability becoming an integral component of identity protection, resonating strongly with security and identity professionals. The concept was a focal point in numerous analyst presentations on identity protection and was frequently discussed among attendees, indicating its recognition as a game-changer for effectively safeguarding identity infrastructures.
Another significant theme emerging from presentations and conversations at the conference, in our view, was the increasing emphasis on finding solutions that address the need for market consolidation. Over recent years, numerous solutions have emerged to tackle specific issues related to securing identities—ranging from identity threat detection and response (ITDR) to non-human identity (NHI) security offerings. However, while these solutions aim to resolve targeted challenges, they often lead to an expansion of the security tools organizations must manage.
Identity and security leaders expressed an almost unanimous desire for a unified approach that addresses the overarching challenge of holistic coverage and protection for all identities, human and non-human, across any environment, including multi-cloud, SaaS, or on-premises. This approach, rather than deploying solutions to address these issues in isolation, is being recognized as the one that meets the challenges of both today and tomorrow. Consequently, discussions increasingly focus on use cases, breadth of coverage, capabilities, expected outcomes, and long-term value. The objective is to foster more comprehensive offerings that streamline security operations, enabling organizations to shift from reactive measures to proactive protective mechanisms within a single platform.
“Coverage of IAM artifacts is critical: You can’t protect what you don’t know about, and what you don’t know about can cause pain and grief when you least expect it.”1 This quote from the Gartner report titled “IAM Hygiene: Laying the Groundwork Through Continuous Discovery,” in our opinion, encapsulates a central theme from expert discussions at the event.
Whether the goal is to streamline identity operations by gaining insights into all activities across the identity infrastructure or to eliminate risks and reduce attack surfaces, it all begins with holistic coverage, discovery, and monitoring of complex identity environments. It is insufficient to focus solely on one type of identity or specific environment; effective protection requires real-time visibility for all identities—human and non-human—and access flows across various applications and deployment models, including multi-cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments.
Our conversations at the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit underscored a promising future for identity protection solutions, prioritizing holistic coverage and identity observability to ensure continuous monitoring and context-driven actionable insights. Organizations actively seek consolidated solutions to address daily challenges and significantly enhance their operations.
At AuthMind, we believe in detecting and analyzing all identity-related activities and access flows to create consolidated visibility with full context—very much in line with market trends. It’s exactly why the AuthMind Identity Protection Platform is designed to help organizations reduce overall risk exposure, streamline operations, improve their identity security posture, and ensure compliance with internal policies, best practices, and regulatory requirements.
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1 Gartner, "IAM Hygiene: Laying the Groundwork Through Continuous Discovery," 20 August 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.