Gartner Predicts By 2014, Notable Project Failures Will Cause 50 Percent of Organizations to Shift their IAM Efforts to Intelligence, Rather than Administration

Key Issues Facing IAM Industry to Be Examined at the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit 2011, March 9-10, Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel, in London

Egham, UK, Organizations are rapidly shifting their identity and access management (IAM) efforts from a tactical focus on administration to a strategic focus on intelligence, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The need to limit costs and deliver real world business results is forcing IAM professionals to take a more strategic approach to IAM,” said Ant Allan, research vice president at Gartner. “With this in mind, we have developed a set of key predictions for 2011 and beyond to aid chief information security officers (CISOs) and other IAM stakeholders when allocating resources and selecting IAM products and services.”

By 2014, notable project failures will cause 50 percent of organizations to shift their IAM efforts to intelligence, rather than administration.
Focusing IAM projects on intelligence — monitoring, log collection, correlation, analytics and reporting — ensures that identity and access intelligence (IAI) tools can deliver quick answers to business questions. Organizations that fail to adopt a formal and effective approach to delivering IAM with IAI will continue to experience delivery challenges as the business places less emphasis on IT’s need for operations efficiency and more emphasis on the organization’s needs for accountability and reliability of access.

Analysts recommend that organizations insist that IAM vendors provide their data models in identity and access event logs and repositories to review available data and information. A catalogue of IAI information should be developed that can benefit specific business intelligence use cases to deliver credibility to future IAM implementations.

By year-end 2013, fewer than 10 percent of all authentication events will involve discrete, specialized authentication hardware of any kind.
As organizations adopt more-robust alternatives to passwords in more situations, they are increasingly considering alternative authentication methods that will enable them to meet their needs for improved security at a lower cost and with a better user experience. Authentication vendors that focus on specialized authentication hardware will find that they are competing in an increasingly niche market. Enterprise broad-portfolio authentication vendors, as well as commodity and specialist vendors, offering alternative authentication methods will be best positioned to capitalize on enterprises’ future investments in new authentication methods. At the same time, they also will continue to see opportunities erode as other vendors and service providers (such as Check Point, Google and Facebook) continue to embed alternative authentication methods in their offerings.

By the end of 2015, more than 50 percent of cloud-based IAM offerings will be hybrid solutions.
A ‘hybrid’ cloud-based IAM solution is defined as using enterprise-based IAM software and scalable service-based technologies integrated for cloud computing. Enterprise IAM implementations continue to be complex and cost-prohibitive to implement or upgrade, and many organizations are seeking simpler implementation and extension strategies. As IAM technologies continue to mature, they are rearchitected as services, with the simplest and most-common technologies targeted first for rewriting. The transition to cloud-based IAM computing will be challenging, but will provide organizations with a foundation for experimentation with relatively low risk, without the need to make major investments or compromise privacy.

Gartner advises organizations to review the current state of individual IAM components, to assess their availability and ability to address existing IAM requirements before making any significant IAM product acquisitions. IT leaders should also assess the impact of inevitable IAM product and service acquisitions in the market on their own IAM implementation road map plan.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “ Predicts 2011: Identity and Access Management Continues Its Evolution Toward a Strategic Discipline.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1476030.

The Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit 2011 will take place March 9-10 at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel in London. For further information about the Summit, please visit europe.gartner.com/iam. Additional information from the event will be shared on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_incusing #GartnerIAM. Members of the media can register for the Summit by contacting Laurence Goasduff, Gartner PR, on + 44 (0) 1784 267 195 or at laurence.goasduff@gartner.com.

About the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit
Intelligence is one of the three pillars of IAM, but until recently it has had much less attention than administration or access. This must change. An improved identity and access intelligence quotient will deliver benefits, not just within the organization’s IAM program, but throughout the organization itself. At the Summit, Gartner analysts will explore the trends that are changing business needs and the ways in which IAM can and must be delivered and examine the transition of IAM into a full business intelligence resource for the organization.

About Gartner:
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the valuable partner to 60,000 clients in 11,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,400 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants, and clients in 85 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.