The world in the post-COVID pandemic era has witnessed a rapid expansion of remote work, adoption of the cloud environment and stringent data privacy requirements while combating the ever-growing menace of cyberattacks. These challenges, combined with the need to provide secure digital transformation initiatives, are undoubtedly shaping varied identity and access management (IAM) trends currently, which will have far-reaching impacts in the next few years as well. Along with securing business-critical data, IAM leaders also need to be cognizant of improving governance, strengthening privileged access management practices for preventing data breaches, creating agile yet robust authentication and authorization protocols, and focusing on consumer IAM for fraud prevention and privacy protection. Let us take a look at some of the current top IAM trends that may enable digital enterprises to secure their businesses without compromising on business continuity, agility, or user experience.

Trends in Identity and Access Management

Enhanced role of AI and ML in identity security practices.

IAM solutions provided through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are expected to enhance identity security further, with the systems providing more precise identity recognition potential. With the use of ML, identity systems will be able to learn varied user behaviors and actions and could detect anomalies proactively, thereby preventing security breaches. Experts opine that these technologies will further help in identifying whether the right person is accessing the system or not, along with predicting any possible internal or external threats that may plague the organization.

Focus on machine identity authentication through Zero Trust and Least Privilege.

While reconsidering their identity management plans to enable faster digital transformation, companies are also expected to include the management of machine identities in their overall IAM strategy. Moving beyond technical and security-centric discussions, such IAM approaches are promoting Zero Trust and Least Privilege frameworks to safeguard systems and minimize cyber threats from internal as well as external factors. In order to enable automation of machine identity authentication through IAM, the Zero Trust model is being implemented to check for user verification and authentication while logging into the system and during the active session as well. Further, Least Privilege, implemented with Zero Trust, ensures that the user is only provided access to limited resources without the system as required for the work to be completed by the user. Move towards Mesh IAM. Digital enterprises are facing the dilemma of providing seamless user access while protecting sensitive data from breaches and maintaining compliance requirements. The challenges are further augmented due to the implementation of fragmented or dispersed IAM solutions. This not only makes the enterprise vulnerable but also creates a complicated process for managing diverse products. Mesh IAM helps address these challenges by creating stronger product management solutions, managing multiple products simultaneously, mitigating identity security risks proactively, and addressing any security challenges on a real-time basis. This is further fueled by the growing dialogue on IAM convergence, creating a need for interoperability between platforms and convergence of various IAM tools for providing a service-based solution rather than a product-based one.

Continued emphasis on data privacy and user consent.

Along with being compliant with the existing data privacy regulations such as GDPR, HIPPA, SOX, and others, IAM providers would have to continue their focus on creating agile and flexible platforms to accommodate more such compliances in the near future. With data privacy violations and data breaches becoming rampant, governments, world-over, are either implementing or planning to implement stringent policies at the earliest. This would mandate enterprises to take consent from users before storing or using their personal information, thereby impacting their business operations on a global scale unless the IAM platform is abreast with the latest compliance requirements.

Emphasis on application integration within IAM.

While in the past, only a few enterprise apps were integrated with any IAM solution, the trend is witnessing a change. Organizations these days focus on integrating an even large number of applications through the Factory Model approach, along with creating frameworks on top of it to onboard new applications. In fact, enterprises are moving towards integrating privileged users handling the application infrastructure, such as users installing/managing the apps and creating dB. Some organizations are even trying to build application onboarding as a request for their users so that there is less dependency on IAM teams. As more and more applications are being integrated, the IAM system will be able to determine the complete footprint of identities within the organization, along with the ability to undertake access reviews in all those integrated applications.