The IAM market is seen as a future growth area in IT security. Gartner research forecast the security software market in 2010 at $16.5Bn. “Gartner notes that identity access management (IAM) is a critical component of enterprises' security strategies, with its clients indicating that around 8% of their security budgets are currently dedicated to IAM. […] overall, the IAM market is estimated to grow to more than $12 billion by 2014” (Info Security, 2010).
In support of Gartner’s forecast an earlier forecast by Forrester predicted an overall smaller market size in 2008 of $12.3Bn by 2014, with IAM solutions to grow >20% annually “from about $2.6 billion worldwide in 2006 to more than $12.3 billion by 2014” (Levine, 2008).
The key drivers that according to Gartner that “will drive the evolution of corporate management of identity and access management (IAM) and privacy management in 2012” (Gartner, 2012) are separated into six trend areas as shown in Table 5.
Table 5 - Table of Trend Areas based on Gartner’s 2012 IAM summit (Gartner, 2012)
These trend areas have become of increasing focus as more applications have become cloud based for most organisations. “According to a Gartner estimate referenced by cloud security company Symplified, IAM as a service (IAMaas) will account for 20 percent of all new IAM sales by the end of 2012, compared with less than 5 percent in 2011” (Williamson, 2013). This shift towards IAM in the cloud is consistent with companies seeking the same OPEX reductions by hosting their business critical applications in the cloud. The future for IAM would need to offer “shorter system implementation times” and “scale rapidly and on-demand” to keep pace with migrations to the cloud (Williamson, 2013).
The increasing complexity of the application landscape demonstrates a need to keep track of the applications and their access management both inside and outside the organisation’s infrastructure; as access control is extended towards external partners and other connected businesses sharing the enterprise's resources.
The trend for data interconnectivity and sharing has been labelled in the industry as ‘Big Data’. There is a growing demand for sharing information between systems which has paved the way for simpler and improved query languages such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and YAML (Perkins, 2012). The control and security of these information flows for organisations could be a key to business operations in the future. A good example would be the usage of ‘Google Trends’ searches to predict stock market moves based on collective behaviours (BBC, 2013).
References
BBC, 2013. Google searches predict market moves. [Online]
Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22293693
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Gartner, 2012. Gartner Identifies Six Trends That Will Drive the Evolution of Identity and Access Management and Privacy Management in 2012. [Online]
Available at: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1909714
[Accessed 2 August 2013].
Info Security, 2010. Gartner report says the global security software market is poised to hit $16.5 billion this year. [Online]
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Levine, C., 2008. Identity and Access Management Market to Reach $12.3 Billion in 2014. [Online]
Available at: http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/data-management/identity-and-access-management-market-to/206904330
[Accessed 2 August 2013].
Perkins, L., 2012. Why JSON will continue to push XML out of the picture. [Online]
Available at: http://blog.appfog.com/why-json-will-continue-to-push-xml-out-of-the-picture/
[Accessed 18 August 2013].
Williamson, J., 2013. The Cloud and its implications in identity and access management. [Online]
Available at: http://www.intercomms.net/issue-19/nsd-2.html
[Accessed 2 August 2013]