So here we are again. Another Gartner Identity and Access (IAM) Management Summit behind us and this year's event saw a swell in the number of delegates as well as a palpable increase in interest and excitement around IAM.
This year's main theme was Identity Intelligence, which explored how identity information could add value to corporate decision making when combined with other Business Intelligence information types.
It was an interesting theme and one CA Technologies has been promoting through our "Power of Know" briefings and presentations, and it was a key theme at the RSA Show in San Francisco
It also added weight to our primary assertion, that IAM should be viewed as a business discipline and not just relegated to Security or an IT domain. The IAM Summit is always an excellent opportunity to talk with senior decision makers within our customers as well as catch up with the analysts and compare notes on industry trends and drivers.
I participated in a Keynote Panel along with Oracle and Gartner Analyst Ant Allen. We discussed a number of IAM topics and had interactive involvement from the audience.
Some of the media who attended also had interesting viewpoints.
The good news is that the business users are starting to have expectations and involvement in IAM and are putting pressure on the IAM project teams to ensure IAM directly helps the business become more competitive and agile. This will be a significant factor in ensuring a business sponsor for IAM and increased success of IAM deployments.
The cloud was a common subject again this year. What I found most encouraging is that the discussions were around practical implementation issues / considerations, rather than, whether or not the cloud is secure enough for enterprise adoption.
I hope we have seen as much progress in IAM adoption by next year's summit, as we did between this year's and last years.