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25/06/2026 12:05 am
TL;DR: The market’s preference for workforce access control that balances compliance, resilience, and user experience across complex enterprise environments is underscored by RSA Security’s recognition in Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Access Management. The signal is not about rankings alone; it shows that identity programmes are being judged on operational assurance as much as access convenience.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by RSA Security: RSA Recognized for the Second Consecutive Year in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management
By the numbers:
- More than 9,000 security-first organizations trust RSA to manage more than 60 million identities across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams connect access management to identity governance?
A: They should link access decisions to role ownership, lifecycle state, and review outcomes rather than treating login policy as a standalone control.
Q: When does access management become a resilience issue?
A: It becomes a resilience issue whenever the identity service is part of business continuity, because outages can block operations or force unsafe workarounds.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about workforce access control?
A: They often over-focus on the sign-in experience and under-focus on entitlement hygiene.
Practitioner guidance
- Re-map access decisions to governance signals Tie workforce access approvals to lifecycle state, role ownership, and posture evidence so entitlements reflect current business need instead of inherited access.
- Test failover under identity service disruption Validate whether authentication and access services preserve controlled operation during cloud outage scenarios, degraded network conditions, and administrative interruption.
- Review entitlement drift in complex workforce structures Run targeted reviews for teams with distributed, hybrid, or exception-heavy access patterns, since those environments are most likely to accumulate stale permissions.
What's in the full analysis
RSA Security's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How RSA frames access management for highly regulated workforce environments and the capabilities it says support that model.
- The vendor’s own explanation of hybrid failover and why it matters for continuity during cloud outages.
- Details on identity security posture management, passwordless access, and how RSA says AI and machine learning inform access decisions.
- Context on the broader RSA Unified Identity Platform and the components it says are unified across access, governance, and lifecycle.
Access management recognition and what it means for IAM teams?
Explore further
25/06/2026 8:54 am
Security-first access management is becoming a governance function, not just an authentication layer. RSA Security’s positioning reflects a broader market reality: access management now sits inside the identity operating model, where governance, lifecycle, and compliance determine whether access is truly trustworthy. For regulated enterprises, the question is no longer whether users can authenticate, but whether access remains aligned to policy over time. Practitioners should treat access control as a governed entitlement decision, not a login feature.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Key Challenges and Risks.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own access management when governance, posture, and lifecycle overlap?
A: Ownership should sit with the identity programme, not a single tool team. Access management crosses IAM, governance, security operations, and infrastructure recovery, so accountability needs a shared operating model with clear decision rights for approvals, exceptions, and revocation.
👉 Read our full editorial: Access management recognition reflects the shift to security-first IAM
