Topic starter
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.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Pathlock: “Gartner® Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration”.
Key questions
Q: How should IAM teams modernize IGA programmes for faster access change cycles?
A: They should move from periodic certification as the core control to a governance model that links policy evaluation, approval routing, and enforcement to live entitlement changes.
Q: Why do access reviews often fail to improve identity governance?
A: Access reviews fail when teams treat completion as success.
Q: What do teams get wrong about AI in IGA?
A: Teams often assume AI is only a productivity layer, when it may also influence or execute identity decisions.
Practitioner guidance
- Map governance decisions to entitlement lifecycle events Tie access approval, review, and revocation workflows to joiner, mover, and leaver changes so governance reflects current access state rather than stale review snapshots.
- Consolidate access, compliance, and risk workflows Design IGA processes so exceptions, evidence collection, and remediation sit in one operating loop instead of being managed by separate teams and tools.
- Use policy automation where rules are already clear Automate recurring governance decisions only after ownership, approval criteria, and exception handling are explicitly defined and tested against real entitlement data.
Bottom line: IGA is moving from periodic certification toward a more operational model that connects access control, compliance, and risk in one governance loop.
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25/06/2026 9:35 am
IGA is becoming an operational control plane, not a periodic review exercise. The market signal here is that governance now has to act continuously across access control, compliance, and risk management. That changes IGA from a backward-looking certification function into a live decision system that tracks entitlement state as it changes. Practitioners should judge tools and programmes on whether they close the gap between policy and enforcement, not just whether they generate audit artefacts.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Nearly 60% of IT leaders cite restrictive cost and complexity as a weakness of legacy identity governance, according to the 2025 State of Identity Governance Report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What does unified governance change for access, compliance, and risk ownership?
A: It forces these functions to operate as one decision loop rather than separate reporting tracks. That means IAM, compliance, and risk teams need shared criteria for exceptions, shared evidence for audits, and shared responsibility for remediation outcomes.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity governance in 2025: what Gartner’s IGA guide signals