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25/06/2026 12:38 am
TL;DR: Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration frames IGA around automation, AI-driven policy enforcement, and unified governance, while noting Pathlock as a representative vendor. The takeaway is that governance programmes now need to connect access control, compliance, and risk management more tightly than legacy certification cycles allow.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Pathlock: Gartner Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should IAM teams evaluate modern IGA platforms?
A: IAM teams should evaluate IGA platforms on governance coverage, evidence quality, and how well they handle different identity types.
Q: Why do identity governance programmes struggle as access estates expand?
A: They struggle because governance rules were often designed for slower, more stable identity populations.
Q: How can organisations unify access control and compliance reporting?
A: Organisations can unify them by using one entitlement model, one evidence standard, and one lifecycle process for approvals, reviews, and removals.
Practitioner guidance
- Re-map identity governance by actor type Separate governance requirements for human users, service accounts, API keys, and AI-mediated access so reviews, evidence, and offboarding are not treated as one generic workflow.
- Audit automation for control quality, not just efficiency Check whether automated approval, certification, and revocation steps are based on current entitlement data, current owners, and current exception logic.
- Define one evidence model across governance and compliance Standardise how access decisions, recertifications, and exceptions are recorded so audit output can be reused across IAM, IGA, and risk reporting.
What's in the full report
Pathlock's full report covers the market-detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Gartner's analyst framing of where IGA capability is heading in 2025 and how buyers are evaluating programme maturity.
- The representative-vendor context around Pathlock and how it is positioned inside the market guide.
- The vendor-facing implementation and evaluation detail that supports procurement and roadmap decisions.
- The broader trend discussion on automation and AI-driven policy enforcement in IGA programmes.
👉 Read Pathlock's Gartner Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration →
IGA market guide 2025: what IAM teams should re-evaluate?
Explore further
25/06/2026 9:35 am
IGA is no longer just a human access review programme. The guide reflects a market shift in which identity governance must span people, service accounts, and increasingly AI-mediated access paths. That matters because review cadence alone does not solve entitlement sprawl, and it never fully captured machine identities in the first place. Practitioners should treat IGA as a cross-identity control system, not a compliance checklist.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 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, which means most governance programmes are operating with incomplete identity inventory.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should security teams do when IGA must cover NHIs as well as people?
A: Security teams should extend governance to non-human identities by including ownership, lifecycle, and revocation controls in the same programme used for human users. If NHIs are excluded, the organisation will keep a blind spot in access certification and offboarding.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity governance in 2025: what Gartner’s IGA guide signals
