Unify your identity platform: Address the IAM trends

Introduction 

“3,205 reported data compromises in the U.S. in 2023, a 78% increase over 2022. 1 In our opinion, this doesn’t even account for unreported breaches.  

So, it’s no secret that cyber threats are increasing exponentially. According to Gartner, 70% of breached organizations reported significant business disruption. 1 Clearly, the more we include technology in our lives, the more threat actors will exploit digital vulnerabilities that can stall or even shut down an organization.

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” - Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, “The Leopard”

But organizational leaders aren’t optionless when managing access and securing their business identities. At the 2024 Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, Gartner identified four identity and access management (IAM) trends. The keynote session, Identity Amplified: Toward Identity-First Business, 1 gave the following four Trends:

  • Machine IAM
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Decentralized and hybrid models
  • IAM Standards

Dive into these trends.

Machine IAM

According to Gartner, “the realm of Machine IAM includes APIs, DevOps, AI pipelines, robotic process automation and service accounts.”1 Most of an organization’s identities are a conglomeration of these non-human identities.

But non-human identities carry inherent risk. In fact, Gartner reports, “12.8 million secrets were publicly exposed on GitHub in 2023 alone, a 28% increase from 2022,” and states that “17 to 25% of organizations have experienced security incidents related to machine identities.” 1

In our opinion, the key to combatting such odds is in building a program and the capabilities to manage and govern these identities. Or, better yet, utilizing a program that already comes with these capabilities built in.

One Identity’s IAM portfolio has been specifically developed to unify your platform and give you more secure data through identity management and governance:

  • One Identity Manager: Manages and governs both human and non-human identities through one intuitive dashboard and integrates AI IAM easily with existing RPA solutions.
  • Safeguard: Ensures compliance by integrating automations throughout machine identities for better secrets management, audit trails and safe, secure privileged access management – as evidenced by this case study.
  • Active Roles: Enhances security of non-human identities in on-premises and hybrid environments with fine-grained delegation, role-specific access control, detailed auditing, machine identity lifecycle automation and Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID policy enforcement.

Artificial intelligence (AI) IAM

Ah, AI in identity security – the cybersecurity world’s most prolific talking point. AI in IAM is at the foreground of securing digital identities. But despite the deepfake horror stories and hilarious “garbage in, garbage out” AI search bar misfires, AI IAM is invaluable to digital security.  

According to Gartner, “AI Adds Value to IAM” in the following ways: “deepfake detection,” “genAI assistants for audits and regulatory reporting,” “detecting outlier behavior through machine learning” and “AI-assisted application onboarding.”1

How is One Identity addressing the threat of AI? And, more importantly, how is it using AI in IAM?

Simply put, AI IAM works best, and is most easily secured, within a unified identity platform like the one we believe One Identity offers. This way, AI IAM can seamlessly work across applications to:

  • Detect risk, analyzing user behavior to pinpoint anomalies and revoke privileges access as needed
  • Deliver role mining insights for optimization of team role policies
  • Identify and shut down authentication and authorization threats by analyzing large amounts of login data with OneLogin’s Vigilance AI Threat Engine 
  • Enhance user experience through identity-related natural language queries to create intuitive, AI-driven dashboards
  • Preempt attacks through partnerships with trusted AI analytics firms

Hybrid IAM

The cybersecurity sphere has been swiftly transitioning to hybrid infrastructures over the past two years. “36% of organizations have a hybrid approach to identity and access decision rights in the last 2 years,” according to Gartner. 1  

Most prominently, IAM is being used to secure assets within the cloud, to allow developers remote access to containers, to lock down laptops and to stream enterprise data into large language models.

For “cloud without compromise,” we believe the best choice is One Identity’s IAM portfolio, which supports not only hybrid, but on-premises, private cloud and software as a service (SaaS) infrastructure.

  • One Identity Manager: By integrating identity governance and administration (IGA) into the cloud with Identity Manager, organizations can gain automated enterprise provisioning, reduce risk, provide auditors with real-time governance reports and much more – all from a single framework that goes beyond on-premises applications to hybrid and SaaS applications.
  • Safeguard: Through Safeguard’s centralization of visibility and control into a single dashboard, consistent policy enforcement, adoption of Zero Trust architecture and regular compliance auditing, businesses can lock down privileged access management (PAM) for ultimate data security – whether on-premises or hybrid.
  • Active Roles: With a unified hybrid Active Directory, achievable through Active Roles, companies can overcome native limitations of ADUC and Azure AD’s administrative interface and optimize day-to-day IAM administration for hybrid environments.

IAM Standards

The evolution of IAM standards is rapid and continuous. The “IAM standards,” according to Gartner, are 1

  • CAEP: Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol
  • SPIFFE: Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone
  • WIMSE: Workload Identity in a Multi-System Environment
  • Authzen: Authorization Framework
  • Verifiable credentials: Share and verify PII in a secure manner

IAM standards, no matter how new, are core to One Identity’s unified identity platform. Its portfolio creates an in-depth identity fabric that weaves together PAM and IGA to create a modern, efficient, secure platform for any environment.

One Identity even offers tools like Starling Connect to accelerate their IAM strategies and to supplement solutions like Identity Manager or other SCIM clients with reduced onboarding time for cloud applications. This SaaS service easily and rapidly integrates with cloud applications using SCIM standard to bolster an organization’s security through advanced IAM.

We believe that unifying your platform with One Identity solutions addresses the industry trends surrounding IAM and boosts your security, resilience and compliance.

Conclusion 

We believe One Identity solutions weave an identity fabric that is uniquely situated to address and implement every IAM trend that Gartner outlines. 1 These specifically designed tools protect the non-human identities composing every organization, administer AI for identity security and extend IAM beyond on-premises environments for a securer, more compliant organization that keeps up with evolving IAM standards.

Fortify your organization in every ecosystem with these top-of-the-line solutions that combine AI in IAM for ultimate security.

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. 

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1 Gartner, Gartner IAM Summit Presentation, Gartner Opening Keynote: IAM Amplified: Toward Identity-First Business, 9 December 2024. Felix Gaehtgens, Michael Kelley, and Rebecca Archambault, December 9-11, 2024 Behavior Driven Governance (BDG) 

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