Industry View

Password Seeks Partner For Long-Term, Secure Relationship

Forrester looks beyond the password to key trends in strong authentication

By Bill Nagel, Forrester Research

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3) Broader trends in the IAM market. Identity management trends also affect the strong authentication market. Companies are struggling to comply with regulations, save costs, and improve their administrative efficiency, but dont yet have a strategic vision of how IAM can help improve business processes. Consolidation, bringing more IAM components under the aegis of a single vendor with a breadth of experience and expertise, is one way to dispel the notion of IAM as a disjointed set of technologies serving primarily tactical ends, and the strong authentication market is mirroring that.

This is not to say that there is no technological innovation happening in the strong authentication space. There is. But it's concentrated among smaller companies that can get CIOs excited about being on the cutting edge of technology. Many of these vendors fill gaps in the major players' product lines and will eventually be acquired by one of them as the consolidation frenzy continues; others will disappear eventually, either into their own niche or altogether.

But for now, most enterprise buyers will stick with the few remaining settled vendors, even as the market swells with small vendors looking for their piece of the authentication pie.

Bill Nagel is a Researcher at Forrester Research. Bill will present new Forrester content on strong authentication at Forrester's IT Forum, May 19-22 in Las Vegas.