There’s something brewing in the world of IAM that could change your business’ future. Here’s a first taste!
Converged IAM is the biggest buzzword in IAM today. According to industry analyst Gartner, Converged IAM products will account for over 45% of new IAM implementations by 2023.
What is Converged IAM?
Converged IAM is a suite with both Access Management and light IGA functionalities, sometimes also including Privilege Access Management. Everything is part of a single solution and operated from a single dashboard. These are typically much less expensive than full-suite IGA products and Access Management procured separately, both in the initial purchase and in the longer cost of ownership. They are also easier to deploy, require less maintenance, and eliminate the complications of using two or more products.
Why is it Needed?
Access Management and IGA are merging. Before they were available only as two different products and mostly built by different companies. This made for complex implementation and upkeep. Besides, any interaction between the functions of the two products was virtually impossible. This perhaps was still manageable, at least for large customers as they had a large workforce in their IAM teams. Things changed. In 2012 Access Management became available in the cloud, was easy to implement and came as annual SaaS subscriptions.
2018 saw another market development. IAM began proliferating mid-size organizations, largely driven by growing security concerns and the need to make access provisioning more efficient. Providing users with a single dashboard control for Access Management, provisioning requests to applications, entitlements, and Access Certification (and for checking Segregation of Duty violations) became imperative as user productivity and experience became intertwined.
As of 2020, most Access Management purchases have become SaaS. IGA however, continued to remain a beast: bulky, complex, difficult to use and expensive. The technology was available only as an on-premises installation or on private cloud, which added to the conundrum.
Today, business roles are changing frequently. It is even more dynamic in mid-size organizations. This is due to trying to increase business agility by adopting a more business driven rather than procedure driven approach. Employees are now part of project teams which require specific permissions (tied to roles), and later become part of a different project team requiring entirely different permissions. In mid-market companies, a single employee may be carrying out different functions to cut cost. All this needs to be tied together with Segregation of Duties (SoD), principle of least privilege, Zero Trust, and many other security and compliance initiatives.
The need for Converged IAM is obvious. Organizations, especially midmarket ones, absolutely require an all-in-one suite that provides both Access Management and common Identity Governance and Administration functions at low cost. The different functions of IAM are required to interoperate with one another, and this is only possible with Converged IAM.
The technology has only come to light in the last year. Gartner coined the term in their latest IGA Market Guide, which has replaced the IGA Magic Quadrant. If you’re looking for IAM for your business, you probably don’t need to look further than a converged solution. It will handle all your needs and address common challenges of buying IAM.
