3 Key Learnings from the Gartner IAM Summit

Mark Nesline

I recently had the opportunity to attend the 2019 Gartner Identity & Access Management (IAM) Summit in Las Vegas. Gartner’s 14th IAM conference, this event had an impressive showing of 2000 attendees and 97 exhibitors, and included more than 65 research-driven sessions. From what I heard, this was one of the two most attended Gartner IAM Summits in 2019.

As Gartner put it, “Greater connectivity is driving radical transformations in every area of life and business. In a connected world, IAM sits at the very core of the business, key to every interaction.” This was very much the theme of the conference: you can’t successfully manage digital transformation without a solid IAM strategy in place.

I had a great time connecting with our customers, partners, and Gartner analysts at the Summit and enjoyed listening to presentations on everything from “Is the Era of Passwordless Authentication Finally Here?” to “Identity is the control plane for your digital transformation.” I walked away with a lot of information, but three things in particular have stuck with me.

  1. Healthcare is embracing IAM. There was a very solid healthcare presence at the Summit. I counted 80 healthcare customer attendees at a breakfast alone. I was also pleased to see a good number of healthcare exhibitors and attendees. This is a clear sign of IAM adoption in the industry.
  1. Identity Governance (IdG) is at the core of any successful IAM strategy. There was a heavy focus on identity governance with a whole track comprised of 11 sessions dedicated to IDG and user management. My colleague, Rebecca Slisz, wrote about one of these sessions here.
  1. Multifactor Authentication (MFA) is the new norm. With 13 sessions dedicated to MFA, there was a heavy focus on MFA. As our partner Microsoft said in a session, “By default you can dramatically improve your security by going with MFA.”

I look forward to seeing how these themes continue to develop this year and I expect to see an even greater healthcare presence at the 2020 Summit.