Machine Identity Was the Focus at Gartner’s IAM Summit

Last week’s Gartner IAM Summit in Grapevine, Texas, was a whirlwind of insights, particularly around machine identity management (MIM). The event underscored the transformative trends and challenges shaping the domain, providing both thought leadership and actionable strategies for businesses navigating these complexities.

Expanding IAM to Embrace Machine and Non-Human Identities

Human identity management and machine identity management serve distinct but complementary purposes within an organization. While human IAM focuses on managing user access to enhance workforce productivity and user experience, machine (non-human) identity management ensures the seamless operation of interconnected systems (devices, workloads, applications, services, APIs and more). Human IAM plays a visible role in business operations, restoring access and minimizing friction for employees and customers. In contrast, MIM operates behind the scenes, preventing outages, failed automations, and vulnerabilities without direct user impact. Together, these frameworks form a unified identity-first security approach to maintaining security, productivity, and operational continuity in today’s complex digital ecosystems.

Machine and non-human IAM extends identity management to devices like desktops and servers, network equipment, mobile endpoints, and IoT/OT systems, as well as complex workloads, including cloud services, virtual machines (VMs), containers, APIs, and applications. These machine (non-human) identities interact continuously across hybrid multi-cloud environments, making secure authentication, access control, and governance essential.

This shift reflects the changing nature of IT ecosystems. As organizations rely on machine-to-machine communications, APIs, and automated workloads, every entity whether human or machine must be treated as a trusted, managed identity. Machine IAM provides the framework for monitoring, securing, and governing these entities, ensuring the baseline of principle of least privilege, no standing privileges and Zero Trust approaches.

Preparing for the Quantum Era

As quantum computing advances, organizations face a critical need to future-proof their cryptographic systems. Quantum computers promise unprecedented computational power, but also pose a significant threat to existing cryptographic protocols, particularly asymmetric algorithms like RSA and ECC.

Key to this strategy is inventorying current cryptographic assets and identifying vulnerabilities in legacy algorithms. Tools must adopt modular approaches to encryption, enabling seamless transitions to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) safe algorithms like CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM and CRYSTALS-KYBER. This modularity ensures ongoing security without operational disruptions as the quantum threat to traditional cryptography evolves.

Security leaders must begin by discovering and inventorying their most critical and sensitive assets, also known as the crown jewels, as these are the assets most likely to be targeted by quantum-enabled threats due to their value and sensitivity.

The organizations must conduct a comprehensive review of their cryptographic assets, including certificates, algorithms, and cryptographic libraries. This process should include mapping all public and private Certificate Authorities (CAs) responsible for issuing and managing critical certificates to ensure a clear understanding of cryptographic dependencies. Simultaneously, it is essential to evaluate the compatibility of PQC algorithms, such as CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM and KYBER, with existing business applications and infrastructure.

This complex process requires significant collaboration across business units, emphasizing the need for automation and crypto agility to streamline operations and ensure efficiency. Gartner is recommending enterprises establish a crypto center of excellence and enable crypto-agility to prepare for PQC now.

Importance of Standards in IAM

The IAM landscape encompasses various domains such as IAM, IGA, PAM, WIM, CLM, and IoT/Edge, each tailored to address specific use cases. However, these solutions often operate in isolation, leading to a fragmented ecosystem. This lack of integration limits cross-platform visibility, reduces operational efficiency, and undermines the ability to establish cohesive and comprehensive security practices.

To overcome these challenges, adopting standardized frameworks becomes essential. Vendors must align their solutions with protocols such as SPIFFE, WIMSE, CAEP, Authzen, and Verifiable Credentials to foster interoperability and integration across diverse ecosystems. Customers, meanwhile, should assess how existing vendor tools fit within their broader operations and support shared signals.

It was great attending sessions, meeting with customers and prospects and talking to complementary vendors at the Gartner IAM Summit. To learn more about how AppViewX can help you with machine identity management, certificate lifecycle management and PKI, request a demo today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by Prasanth Sundararajan. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/machine-identity-was-the-focus-at-gartners-iam-summit/