What we learned at Gartner IAM Americas 2021

Last week IT professionals across the Americas gathered virtually at the Gartner IAM Americas event to learn about IAM (identity and access management) trends and best practices from leading analysts and companies. Entrust hosted two well-attended sessions – real-life IAM war stories and a peer conversation on digital citizen identities, notably health and travel credentials.

Here are eight key takeaways from this year’s marquee IAM event:

Identity is the ultimate attack surface. No shock that the network security perimeter is dead, but now it’s identity that forms the critical foundation for secure connections, devices, upgrades, data, and users.

IAM is not a standalone component. As highlighted by the SolarWinds attack, security should be conceived as an ecosystem and one in which IAM needs to be integrated throughout.

Apply CIAM best practices to secure your hybrid/remote workforce. To address hybrid and remote employee lifecycle management, take a page from customer identity access management (CIAM) and fraud solutions including identity proofing and authentication.

Digital citizen identities come of age. Driven by the pandemic, government agencies have realized the critical need to be able to efficiently, effectively, and securely deliver government services digitally vs. in-person. Now, as we move into a post-pandemic world, digital health and travel credentials for citizens are being positioned as ways to accelerate a return to normal.

Fraud detection and authentication are merging. IAM has fuzzy boundaries at the best of times. Now it’s fraud detection’s turn. Continuous identity assurance with contextual device and user awareness is ideal to proactively flag suspect transactions and provide a step-up challenge to help prevent fraud.

Cloud migration is accelerating. In a recent TechValidate survey, a third of our IAM customers cited cloud migration as a top priority for 2021. And this trend was very consistent with research shared by Gartner analyst Henrique Teixeira in his session titled “How to Choose an Access Management Solution.”

Realize a no-remorse roadmap. The pandemic drove many emergency purchase decisions around remote workforce access, collaboration tools, and customer portals. Now is the time to revisit, re-evaluate, and consolidate those decisions before they inadvertently become permanent.

Protect user privacy with an identity trust fabric. With decentralized identities (DIDs) and BYOI, people are able to use the identity of their choice (i.e., banking, government, social, mobile ID) to transact with service providers, while an identity trust fabric prevents the service provider from even knowing which identity was used, let alone having access to these credentials.

No doubt there’s lots to be optimistic for in the coming months and year ahead, and it’s clear that identity will occupy a central role in our post-pandemic world. Interested in learning more about digital citizen credentials?

The post What we learned at Gartner IAM Americas 2021 appeared first on Entrust Blog.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Entrust Blog authored by Jenn Markey. Read the original post at: https://blog.entrust.com/2021/05/what-we-learned-at-gartner-iam-americas-2021/