The Analyst Brief

This week Simon and David review some interesting moves in the identity governance and administration space.  First up Saviynt raised $205 million (along with founding CEO Sachin Nayyar returning as CEO after a stint at Securonix) to bolster their Enterprise Identity Cloud offering.  Next up they discuss Radiant Logic entering into a definitive agreement to acquire French IGA specialist Brainwave GRC.  What does this tell us about the global IAM and IGA space?  Where will they head to?  Will more funding and acquisitions happen in 2023?  They also review SiberX CISO Forum in Canada and the Future of Cyber conference held in the UK.

This week Simon and David discuss a $26 million series B round for identity orchestration vendor Strata.io. What is identity orchestration, why is it a problem today and how can it be handled within the enterprise?  What is IDQL and what are recipes?  A discussion on a recent consent breach at Home Depot in Canada saw the Canadian Privacy Commissioner got involved. They also review a recent poll covering our favourite biometric, which spawned a discussion around identity based authentication (see 1Kosmos and keyless.io for more on that).  They also delved into the world of IAM maturity assessments...

Welcome to the first episode of 2023! After a short festive break, Simon and David are back to bring you the latest industry analyst views on a range of different identity and access management topics.  This week, they have a special guest: Kristian Alsing - a Senior Cyber Security and Business Resilience Executive - with 20 years experience working for the likes of Accenture and Deloitte.  Kristian recently wrote a great guest article for The Cyber Hut on NIS-2. In this episode the guys cover a range of topics relating to regulation and the role of IAM - covering critical infrastructure, the ever increasing supply chain and the rise of destructive attacks in waiting!

As the end of 2022 is on the horizon, Simon and David run through a festive quiz roulette, hitting some of the key topics of interest from the past 12 months including.. Favourite conference of 2022 Favourite identity buzz word IAM acronym / topic that will die in 2023 Biggest IAM surprise in 2022 Most interesting IAM startup / category IAM acronym / topic that will come alive in 2023 Huge shout out to a range of vendors including...HYPR, Aserto, 1Kosmos, Indykite, PlainID, Axiomatics, Styra, Sonrai, Ermetic, Strata, SecureKey, SDO, Gen, ForgeRock, Ping, Okta, Cyberark, Sailpoint, Auth0, tru.id, SGNL, 3Edges, Keyfactor and many more. Have a great festive period and we'll see you in 2023!!

In this week's cold and snowy episode, Simon and David review a recent The Cyber Hut poll asking the question around where does IAM report into within your organisation?  What about consumer identity and privacy?  Also...do we need a new role - the Chief Identity Officer?  How can the reporting lines impact the hiring and firing of IAM and cyber security personnel?  And a brief look at the re-branded Microsoft identity capabilities known as Entra.

This week Simon and David bring you another dose of analyst insight and opinion on the world of identity and access management.  This week they discuss how HYPR received a $25 million funding round to rid the world of passwords; a discussion around how identity is now foundational for zero trust - and how the US DoD released a reference architecture for zero trust and what that means for identity - and an interesting poll result, on the question "Would you pay for privacy?".

This week Simon and David discuss a funding round for secrets management startup Akeyless who this week announced a $65 million funding round.  The need for secrets, machine identities and service credential management is on the rise and Akeyless are aiming to securely automate this area.  IAM platform player ForgeRock also announced this week, they were launching a cloud based identity governance and administration (IGA) service.  The world of IGA has been dominated by on-prem solutions.  Can ForgeRock make a difference?  They round out this weeks chat, with a review of the Future Identity two day festival that happened in London this week.  Simon hosted a panel on mobile authentication - launching a riff on biometrics, privacy, identity based authentication and more...

This week Simon and David met up face to face at the Whitehall IDM Conference in London.  This one day event covered a host of topics, case studies and vendor pitches.  Simon and David pick out the best and most interesting aspects focused on the rise of AI+ML in authentication and IGA - asking the question is identity becoming a big data problem?  They discuss the emergence of machine and service identities - what it is, who will own it and how it works.  They cover cyber insurance the ever growing need to articulate the business case for IAM and how identity for zero trust architectures is for small and large organisations alike.

After a short break, Simon and David return to discuss the recent $2.3 billion acquisition of ForgeRock by Thoma Bravo and the effect that may have on the broader IAM market - with Thoma Bravo already recently completing the acquisition of Ping Identity.  They also cover the recent Authenticate 2022 conference and how can we improve MFA adoption?  An emerging vulnerability in asymmetric challenge response authentication and passkeys also make an appearance...

This week Simon and David continue the conversation around identity and access management deployment patterns.  Identity is broad and can be deployed in many different ways - yet buy side decision makers and vendors alike often misunderstand the nuances seen in the difference between SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Managed Services and the classic on-premises.  The Cyber Hut released a free open source article this week outlining the definitions.  Identity Threat Detection and Response startup Oort received a $15M round this week - Simon and David weigh in on identity funding and the rise of ITDR in general.  And finally German based identity consultancy IC-Consult acquired fellow specialists Kapstone to make an 800 strong private consultancy practice.