Nexis in EMEA: what Gartner peer data says about IGA

At a glance

What this is: A vendor commentary piece on Gartner peer listing positions for Nexis in EMEA IGA markets, with the key finding that visibility and explainability matter most in complex regulated industries.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM teams need governance models that can explain access, entitlements, and roles across legacy and hybrid estates, not just automate workflows.

👉 Read Nexis's analysis of Gartner peer data for IGA in EMEA

Context

Identity governance becomes difficult when organisations must explain who has access to what across many systems, roles, and regulatory boundaries. In EMEA insurance, manufacturing, and telecommunications, that problem is intensified by hybrid infrastructure, legacy entitlements, and audit demands that make simple provisioning workflows insufficient.

This post is about what Gartner peer listing visibility signals for IGA practice, not about taking a vendor ranking at face value. The underlying issue is whether organisations can build an explainable access model that supports reviews, remediation, segregation of duties, and cross-system governance without losing operational clarity.

Key questions

Q: How should teams improve access reviews in complex hybrid environments?

A: Teams should start by improving entitlement visibility before trying to optimise review frequency. If reviewers cannot trace how access was granted, certifications become rubber stamps. The practical goal is to make every material entitlement explainable across legacy, cloud, and delegated systems so business owners can approve or revoke access with confidence.

Q: Why do traditional IGA workflows fall short in regulated industries?

A: Traditional workflows often handle provisioning and certification well, but they do not always explain the relationships behind access. In regulated industries, that gap matters because auditors want to understand why the entitlement exists, not only whether it was reviewed. Governance needs data and context, not just task completion.

Q: What breaks when access data is fragmented across many systems?

A: When access data is fragmented, organisations lose the ability to reconstruct who has what and why. That creates weak reviews, slow remediation, and poor segregation of duties decisions. The failure is usually not a missing approval step. It is an incomplete identity picture that makes every downstream governance action less reliable.

Q: Who should own identity intelligence in an IGA programme?

A: Identity intelligence should be owned jointly by IAM, governance, and security stakeholders because it affects both operational access and audit defensibility. The key is to treat entitlement modelling as a programme capability, not a one-time implementation task. Ownership should sit where data quality, policy, and business context can be maintained together.

Technical breakdown

Identity visibility and intelligence layers in IGA

An identity visibility and intelligence platform sits above operational IGA tools and consolidates data about identities, entitlements, roles, and relationships across heterogeneous systems. The point is not to replace provisioning or certification. It is to make access patterns explainable when entitlements are spread across legacy applications, cloud services, and business-specific platforms. In complex environments, decision quality depends on being able to see how access was granted, inherited, and accumulated over time.

Practical implication: map where entitlement data is fragmented and build a governance layer that can reconcile identities before access reviews begin.

Explainable access decisions for hybrid environments

Hybrid identity estates often fail at the explanation layer, not only the enforcement layer. When auditors or business owners ask why an account has access, the answer may require tracing nested roles, delegated permissions, and application-specific exceptions. Explainability means the organisation can reconstruct that path in human terms. Without it, access reviews become shallow approvals, and remediation turns into manual investigation rather than controlled governance.

Practical implication: require every high-risk entitlement to have a traceable access path that can be explained without specialist system knowledge.

Why IGA cannot stay a workflow-only discipline

Traditional IGA emphasises joiner-mover-leaver automation, certifications, and policy enforcement, but modern estates need decision support as well. The challenge is that access structure is shaped by years of mergers, legacy application design, and business exceptions. That means governance has to understand relationships among identities, roles, risks, and entitlements before it can fix them. In practice, IGA becomes a data problem as much as a process problem.

Practical implication: treat governance data quality and entitlement relationship modelling as prerequisites for automation, not downstream cleanup.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

IGA is becoming an intelligence problem before it is a workflow problem. The article reflects a broader market truth: organisations cannot govern what they cannot explain. In complex EMEA sectors, identity structure is accumulated across systems, and workflow automation alone does not resolve the relationship between identities, entitlements, and risk. Practitioners should read this as a signal that governance architecture must start with visibility.

Explainability is the control surface that hybrid environments now expose. The real failure in complex estates is not simply overprovisioning, but the inability to reconstruct why an entitlement exists. That matters in regulated industries where auditors, security teams, and business stakeholders need an answer that is both accurate and understandable. Practitioners should treat access explainability as a governance requirement, not a reporting feature.

Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms sharpen a gap that traditional IGA has left open. Conventional IGA is strong at workflow execution, but weaker at building a connected view across heterogeneous systems. The named concept here is the explainability gap: access can be granted, but the governance model cannot always show the path cleanly. Practitioners should expect that gap to drive future IGA evaluation criteria.

Complex industries will increasingly judge IGA by its decision support, not just its certification throughput. Insurance, manufacturing, telecommunications, and similar sectors are testing whether governance tools can support role design, remediation prioritisation, and audit-ready access narratives. That shifts buying criteria away from narrow feature comparisons and toward data completeness, relationship modelling, and operational traceability. Practitioners should reassess whether their current stack can support those outcomes.

From our research:

• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• For teams trying to close that visibility gap, the Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs gives the governance context needed to move from inventory to control.

What this signals

Identity governance is moving toward explainability as a control requirement, not a reporting nicety. As environments become more hybrid and more regulated, programmes that cannot reconstruct access paths will struggle to defend certification outcomes or remediation choices. Teams should expect governance maturity to be measured by the quality of their entitlement relationships, not by the volume of workflows they can push through a tool.

The market signal here is that identity programmes need a second layer of data quality above standard IGA automation. When roles, entitlements, and exceptions are spread across multiple platforms, the governance team has to build a durable model of access lineage before review cadence becomes meaningful.

For practitioners

• Inventory entitlement relationships across hybrid systems Build a cross-system map of identities, roles, inherited permissions, exceptions, and delegated access so governance teams can see where explainability breaks down.
• Prioritise high-risk access paths for explanation Focus first on privileged, regulated, or business-critical entitlements where auditors and approvers need a clear path from identity to permission.
• Separate workflow automation from governance quality Measure whether certifications and approvals are backed by reliable entitlement data, because automation without relationship modelling only accelerates bad decisions.
• Use access review output to improve role design Turn recurring exceptions and remediation patterns into role engineering inputs so the next review cycle reduces noise instead of repeating it.

Key takeaways

• The central issue is not workflow volume but whether access can be explained across complex identity estates.
• Public peer visibility in EMEA-regulated sectors underscores how strongly governance buyers now value traceability and decision support.
• IAM teams should treat relationship modelling and access lineage as prerequisites for reliable certification and remediation.

Key terms

• Identity Visibility And Intelligence Platform: A governance layer that aggregates identity and entitlement data from multiple systems so teams can understand access relationships more clearly. It helps organisations trace how permissions were assigned, inherited, or modified across heterogeneous environments, which is especially useful where standard IGA workflows do not provide enough context for reviews or audits.
• Explainable Access Decision: An access decision that can be reconstructed in plain language from identity, role, entitlement, and policy data. In practice, explainability means approvers and auditors can see why access exists, not just that it was approved. This becomes critical in complex hybrid environments where exceptions and inherited permissions are common.
• Entitlement Relationship Modelling: The process of mapping how identities connect to roles, permissions, exceptions, and downstream systems. It is more than inventory because it shows dependency and inheritance, which makes governance actions more accurate. Without relationship modelling, access reviews often miss why a permission exists or what will break if it is removed.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Nexis: Analysts Nexis in EMEA and Gartner peer data on IGA visibility. Read the original.