“Having a comprehensive Identity and Access Management (IAM) capability…is essential for any modern business.”
That’s how KuppingerCole Senior Analyst Warwick Ashford begins his blog post exploring Identity Fabrics. In fact, Ashford writes that “management of identities and permissions in digital transformation is the key to security, privacy, compliance, governance, and audit, as well as system usability and user satisfaction. Traditional IAM systems meet only a fraction of current requirements, and therefore a new, modern approach is necessary.”
And it’s why the recent KuppingerCole Leadership Compass Identity Fabrics report is such an important contribution to businesses generally and cybersecurity specifically. It explores how vendors are creating that “new, modern approach” via Identity Fabrics, which “support various types of identities such as employees, partners, consumers, or things. They deliver the full range of identity services required by an organization.”
It’s also why I’m thrilled that RSA was named a leader in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass Identity Fabrics report in the Overall Leadership, Innovation, and Market Leadership categories. The Leadership Compass analyzes which IAM offerings are best suited to form the foundation for an Identity Fabric that can deliver “the full range of identity services” that organizations require.
Identity Fabrics is a relatively new category for KuppingerCole. It recognizes an emerging problem that many businesses face: when a new employee joins, how do we ensure that she’s productive in her job and has the entitlements she needs to do her job—and none of the privileges that she doesn’t?
Ultimately, businesses need a comprehensive, flexible IAM solution that works no matter where they are on their cloud journey. The Identity Fabrics category underscores that businesses need vendors that supply solutions to their unique problems. When it comes to Identity Fabrics, one size fits none.
How did KuppingerCole rate vendors? It evaluated their solutions’ security, functionality, integration, interoperability, usability, and innovativeness. At a minimum, companies in the report should include identity governance and administration (IGA) and access management, and their solutions should support all types of identities and meet the KuppingerCole architecture, deployment, and interoperability requirements.
In short, to make it into the Identity Fabrics Leadership Compass, a vendor had to do a lot of things across identity—and they had to do them all well. Several highlights from KuppingerCole’s review follow below and you can find the full report here.
The Leadership Compass report specifically addresses the RSA transformation from offering “well-established on-premises solutions” to “a modern, feature-rich and fully integrated platform for serving the needs of modern Identity Fabric architectures.”
KuppingerCole adds that the strongest part is RSA “support for modern authentication. They support access management and single sign-on for a broad variety of solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud.”
The report also highlights our support for a wide variety of authenticators, integration with our risk engine, improvements to user interfaces, self-service support, and the dashboard and analytics in our integrated portal.
KuppingerCole emphasized our flexible deployment options, pointing out that “customers can add on-premises capabilities if required for better serving legacy-heavy infrastructures” and integrate SaaS as needed to support their “gradual migration” to the cloud.
I think that’s one of our core differentiators: our true hybrid approach allows us to meet customers wherever they are on their cloud journey, and not make them come to us.
Identity is a cornerstone of cybersecurity, and every company should know who, what, where, why, and how people and devices are accessing their networks. To get more details about RSA identity solutions, download the full Leadership Compass Identity Fabrics report and discover how RSA is transforming IAM for our customers.
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Download the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass Identity Fabrics report
