RSA has been named a “Leader” in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrants, for both User Authentication and Identity Governance and Administration, for the second consecutive year. Being named a leader in both of these categories is particularly exciting because it supports RSA’s IAM vision as we head into 2015.
If you work in Information Security, cost-savings, driving efficiency, and regulatory compliance are themes surrounding you on a daily basis. These are all driving factors in IT decision-making today. Organizations are doing more with less, hence the need to drive efficiency. You need your people to be efficient, your processes to promote efficiency, and your technologies to help you achieve maximum efficiency.
But efficiency is not the only goal – just a few years ago, a Forbes article suggested that organizations were adopting Identity Management solutions because of the need to be in compliance with government regulations. And a few years later, here we are. The importance of regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and many, many others has transformed what used to be an IT role into a dual role as a compliance guru + business-savvy IT professional. So, how can you own IT compliance while still maintaining a primary role in IT, not impeding business efficiency and not blowing the budget… all at the same time? This is where you can rely on a technology partner to share the burden. You should be confident that you have the right technologies in place to manage the transactions responsible for keeping your organization moving, your budget on track, your data safe, all while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Whether you choose to leverage relationships with technology partners or not, the first step to protecting your applications and data is making sure you have a clear picture of your users’ identities, a view of “who has access to what”, and a way of ensuring that users are who they say they are, and can only access resources that are appropriate to them based on job role and function.
As mobile, cloud, and consumerization continue to push the limits of security teams, maintaining a unified approach to governance, lifecycle and access management is a necessity. It’s not enough anymore to have great authentication, great provisioning, great governance and piece them together. You need one brain. One brain that understands how to extract elements of an identity to determine business and risk context. One brain that can manage policy across diverse platforms, users, and authentication methods.
When RSA announced its acquisition of Aveksa, analyst Martin Kuppinger of KuppingerCole asked the question “Will [RSA and Aveksa] redefine the IAM/IAG market?”. Eighteen months later, RSA is the only vendor to be named a “Leader” across the two Gartner MQ reports mentioned above. As we head into 2015 and prepare to execute on the next phase of our IAM strategy, we believe this sends a positive message to the market that RSA is able to provide the ‘one brain’ customers need to manage user authentication AND identity governance needs.
View more about RSA’s placement in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for User Authentication and Identity Governance and Administration.
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