Bad puns in the title of this blog post aside (queue the rolling of the eyes, sigh, and slight smirk), we are pleased to announce that “The Forrester Wave™: Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Q4 2020” is now live. While PIM vendors have been adding new capabilities and improved user experience over the past two years, the surge in remote work in 2020 brought the added challenge of all privileged users needing very secure and highly available remote access to their full set of PIM capabilities. We evaluated the top 10 PIM vendors and scored them across 24 criteria.

Some of the key insights that we identified during the Wave evaluation process included:

  • Reporting and analytics are essential. While the leading PIM vendors we evaluated offer advanced reporting features, hundreds of prebuilt out-of-the-box reports, and data science teams, other vendors are continuing to invest in reporting and analytics to support customer requirements. Centralized dashboards and intuitive reporting are especially important for favorable user experience so that customers can detect threats and take appropriate action to protect the organization.
  • Effective customer support is a key to successful deployments. Across the board, customers noted the importance of having responsive and effective customer support from their PIM vendor. Positive customer experiences stemmed from a good working relationship, flexibility, availability of regional support, and investment in their success (roadmap alignment, integrations, etc.).
  • Support for new PIM use cases is a key differentiator. The leading PIM products address a variety of use cases, including for DevOps teams, cloud, bots, internet of things, and API-driven workloads. By some estimates, machine identities are growing at twice the rate of human identities. PIM vendors must offer solutions that reflect this evolving nature of technology and the development cycle.

Please review the Wave evaluation and schedule an inquiry for more details on how you can best leverage privileged identity management within your organization.