Thursday, March 12

IAM as a Service - 20% of the Market

Today, Gartner identified their Identity and Access Management predictions for 2009 and beyond. First on the list is:
By 2011, hosted IAM and IAM as a service will account for 20 per cent of IAM revenue.
I've discussed managed services for Identity Management in previous posts. I think it's a natural progression. Identity and Access Management is an extremely complicated technology-set. Any given IT shop's ability to maintain the right skills to support an IAM environment is probably more costly (in effort and dollars) than outsourcing that function to specialists. And this certainly appears to be the beginning of an Era of Cost where cost has moved up the list of decision influencers.

I'm honestly a bit surprised and impressed to see Gartner come out on this one. I tend to think of them as a bit more conservative – making predictions that follow a trend that has already begun. Has this trend started to take shape or is Gartner a bit agressive on this one?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think this is very aggressive. Historically Gartner have not been very good when it comes to spotting IDM trends. This looks like a case of bandwagon jumping to me.

Robert Craig said...

The market is moving so fast it's hard to say how big it will be. The Open Cloud Manifesto (http://www.opencloudmanifesto.org)was posted yesterday and the the first of the challenges and barriers to adoption they described was the need for, "Consistency around authentication, identity management, compliance, and access technologies..."

Gimmy said...

Hi Guys, have you any link to "hosted IAM"/"IAM as a service" resources?

Matt Flynn said...

Gimmy, what kind of info are you looking for?

Gimmy said...

@Matt: I'm looking for resources that can give me an introduction on the Saas approach to Idm.
Mainly: products and features, architectures, integration/evolution of in house solutions and security issues. Thank you!

Gimmy said...

Hi Matt, I'm looking for resources about common architectures, best practices and standards, integration and security issues related to this new "way to do IAM". Can you, or the other guys, help me? Thank you!

Matt Flynn said...

Gimmy, I don't have anything for you on that, but I'll ask around. I think this approach is still too new to have any industry accepted best-practices or standards. I suspect that any vendors offering these services will do things their own way (using knowledge from traditional IAM) for a while until things shake out.