Impressions from Gartner IAM 2019

Hosted at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, NV, the 2019 Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit (IAM) focused primarily on the three primary components of Identity and Access Management. The three components: Access Management, Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) are established verticals that still develop rapidly, with new features and capabilities constantly emerging. Biometrics continues to be “just on the horizon”, while the market moves to expand application of DevOps and remote access. The most rapid changes, however, continue to be in the support for cloud solutions of all kinds—including solutions to synchronize, integrate, and federate identities across environments were everywhere.

While the annual Gartner IAM Summits focus on identity-related topics, overarching IT world themes, such as Cloud, IoT, and automation, inevitably underpin a lot of the discussion. The week culminated with the reveal of the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrants for Access Management, Privileged Access Management, and Identity Governance and Administration.

Today, identity serves as a foundation for so much of the biggest IT trends. This was reflected at the Summit with blockchain, public cloud, IoT, and B2C sprinkled throughout the content. For me, the top sessions of the week included talks on biometrics, identity vision and strategy, along with identity in Office 365, Azure, AWS and GCP. Identity and Access Management continues to be the first line in the defense against malicious actors and will continue to grow even more critical as more of our lives become just a login away.

Throughout the week, attendees had the opportunity to take part in numerous, highly valuable sessions, but perhaps the highest return on investment for attendees is in the networking opportunities and Exhibition floor. The event sponsors set up vendor booths and were eager to demonstrate and discuss their products in a fun, relaxed setting. Additionally, every moment of the day presents opportunities for networking with peers who can often provide experience and guidance into tackling the same challenges your organization is facing.

This year's Gartner IAM attendees should have definitely left with solid guidance on IAM, PAM, and IGA, along with a short list of options if they hadn't already implemented such solutions. In addition, Passwordless authentication, decentralized identity, and zero trust were hot topics that gave attendees more to consider post-conference.