Chris Owen, Director of Product Management at Savyint is to deliver a presentation on Worlds Collide: The Importance of Convergence in IAM on Tuesday, September 14 starting at 8:30 pm at EIC 2021.
To give you sneak preview of what to expect, we asked Chris some questions about his planned presentation.
When worlds collide is an interesting subject. What does it actually mean and what is colliding?
Worlds colliding is essentially looking at the different markets that exist within the identity space. So in particular, if we take privileged access management (PAM) and identity governance and administration (IGA), they've typically existed within silos. So PAM tools were originally designed for on-premise infrastructure, for managing access into a data center and critical assets. IGA tools have really focused on provisioning identity life cycle management. What we're starting to see now is these worlds really coming together. And a lot of that is driven by cloud adoption because now everything has an identity.
And as people adopt more cloud, privileged controls are really having to change, it's no longer just about access to servers and where the critical data is. It's access to interfaces, consoles, and at the same time everything has an identity. What's becoming important is the fact that you need to govern these identities, have visibilities of where they are, and bring further context into the management of these identities. The concept of worlds colliding is really these two types of technology really becoming closely aligned together, and what we call convergence, where essentially they are becoming the same platform.
Is this specific to IGA and PAM or do you see this happening in other areas?
This is definitely something that's happening in other areas. So if we look at the identity market as a whole, we're starting to see a lot of consolidation taking place. A lot of vendors are starting to now combine technologies, not just IGA and PAM, you're starting to see PAM and IDaaS type solutions. You have typical IDaaS vendors, such as Okta that are making moves into the IGA and PAM space as well. So there's a lot of adjacent things happening. There's also other areas within security in the identity space. So new acronyms around cloud infrastructure, entitlements management, cloud security, posture management, kind of coming together and that may get consumed by Pam IGA tools as well.
Some customers have already made large investments in identity solutions, why would they move to a converged solution?
There are really some key drivers to moving towards a converged solution. Some of those are cost savings, benefits, time, efficiency, and that type of thing, but certainly a lot of organizations have made investments. These may be on-prem, they may be more traditional siloed approaches. So there's definitely a good time to embrace these types of technologies. Digital transformation is a key driver to look at our technology stacks, to make sure it's meeting our requirements, to make sure that it's fit for purpose. And that's a good time to transition towards these type of new converged solutions as they are.
Do you expect more changes in the future?
I think the technology landscape is constantly evolving. I think we will definitely see more. I think we'll see more consolidation within the industry. There'll be more acquisitions. There'll be more, I guess, new bleeding edge type of technologies that come into the fold as well. So cloud security posture management is definitely the big subject of the moment and infrastructure entitlements management. At the moment, that is very much a segregated market. And there's a lot of new vendors coming into that space. But I think we'll definitely see more consolidation take place there, and perhaps, more established markets such as secrets management, really being brought into that fold as well.