Analyst Notes – IC Consult & ICSynergy, Open Policy Agent and Consumer Identity Market Explosion
A few items that have popped into The Cyber Hut inboxes over the past week relating to funding and vendor news.
iC Consult Group Completes Acquisition of ICSynergy
iC Consult, a European consulting firm focused specifically in the areas of identity and access management announced they had acquired US integrator ICSynergy. ICSynergy has been around since 2000 and is based out of Texas. They provide both IAM and PAM advisory services and LinkedIn lists 65 employees. Whilst an advisory outfit, they do have a “product” focus in the form of IdentityRM. This is a relationship management tool that looks to solve the complex interactions often found in the B2X business models – which perhaps many classic IAM platforms fail to deliver against. IC Consult is the bigger of the 2 organisations by a magnitude, with nearly 300 employees according to LinkedIn and a broad focus across both B2E and B2C identity deployments.
The Challenges of OPA?
OPA (Open Policy Agent) has been around for a number of years and has seemingly taken the lead in the popularity stakes when it comes to microservices protection and “policy-as-code” style architectures. The Cyber Hut recently did a technology test drive of the project with its highly capable Rego language and deployment capabilities. However, as the number of deployments rocket, a secondary overlay industry is emerging, with numerous services providing user interface, policy management and governance services based on OPA.
See PlainID, Cloudentity, Scaled Access as some examples, but that is by no means the entire list with of course the maintainers of OPA – Styra – providing an entire capability suite to support OPA.
A recent blog by authorization startup Aserto amplifies the talk track surrounding how policy code needs to be version controlled and distributed. An interesting secondary problem for those building more complex architectures with codified access control.
Consumer IAM market to reach $17.6 billion by 2026
Apparently the CIAM is going to be worth $17.6 billion in 4 years time. I can’t argue either way and I’m never really a fan of futurism when it comes to total addressable market sizes, however, there is no denying that the market for consumer/citizen and customer identity is large AND growing. Delivering services online is no longer just the focus of the largest legacy enterprises moving from the physical world. Organisations of all sizes across all sectors are doing so. The potential to create a million user community with only 5 employees is surprisingly common. All of these external facing systems will require more than “just a login box” as many now understand. Continual security, privacy, PII protection, compliance, multi-platform support, IoT integration, scaling and a lot more all need to be considered.
Another associated article this week leveraged the acronym PIE (personal identity ecosystem). This was in an article on the Fast Company site by the CEO of Prove a mobile centric identity verification provider.
NB – If further skills are needed in this space, take a look at the 2 day masterclass The Cyber Hut are hosting on Feb 1 / 2nd. Albeit if tickets have sold out, it will be run again later in the year.
Merit Announce $50 million Series B
California based Merit (previously Sigma) announced this week a Series B financing round worth $50 million. The round took their overall funding to $80 million. Merit focus on the verified credentials aspect of the identity life cycle, describing themselves as the “clearing house for identity”. An intriguing strap-line. Their focus seems to be on the US government sector, where a reduction in paper during the identity on-boarding process for many services would be of huge attraction.
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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Cyber Hut authored by Editor. Read the original post at: https://www.thecyberhut.com/analyst-notes-ic-consult-icsynergy-open-policy-agent-and-consumer-identity-market-explosion/
