I wanted to wrap up 2022, with an anecdotal look at some of the key facts and figures that made up the bulk of The Cyber Hut’s interactions, research and community engagement over the past year.
It has been a great year professionally and personally, yet parts of the world are still being ravaged by the pandemic, conflict, economic turmoil and the cost of living crisis. Hopefully 2023 can start to stabilise some of those broader problems we will undoubtedly all feel in the coming months.
I want to take a retrospective look back at 2022 in numbers, adding in a few stories and comments as I go. I hope you enjoy it and thank you to all of the global identity and access management community who have engaged with The Cyber Hut over the past 12 months.
The Cyber Hut’s Most Popular Webinar
I run vendor and supplier webinar’s most months. They typically focus on the buy side advocacy narrative, sitting down with emerging identity and access management suppliers in an industry “fireside chat” style to understand solution offerings, thought leadership pointers and emerging practice. Some of the topics for 2022 included an introduction to SIM based authentication, the role of biometrics in the face of compliance, a discussion on the “build versus buy” approach to authorization and several CISO briefings on topics like consumer identity and external authorization.
The webinar which attracted the most attention was “It’s not me it’s you: Why consumer identity hates passwords“. This event was actually just at the end of 2021 with Transmit Security, but received over 400 registrants. Why the popularity? Passwordless authentication has seen a real up swing in demand and funding over the past 2 years or so, as organisations like Transmit, HYPR, Secret Double Octopus, tru.id, keyless.io and a host of others, aim to solve the usability and security problems with one magic bullet – often relying on biometrics and FIDO (and FIDO2/WebAuthn). It seems consumer/customer and citizen based projects have the most to benefit from such an approach.
The Cyber Hut’s Most Popular Article
The most popular piece of free open source analysis, was an article entitled “How the Identity & Access Management Industry is Unbundling“. This 4 min read article was discussing how IAM has potentially started to move away from the “platform advantage” and allowed more specialist providers of capabilities such as authentication, access control, threat detection or privacy preservation to take market share. Perhaps these are new markets, or perhaps the increased range of interoperability, API-first integrations and an emphasis on data flow, is allowing a more a decoupled approach to IAM – that is more composable, agile, secure and usable. The second most popular article was a comment on the recent US Department of Defence’s reference architecture for zero trust. The article focused on the IAM aspects of the report.
The Week In Identity’s Most Popular Podcast Episode
June saw the launch of The Week in Identity podcast – an industry analyst comment-style discussion on contemporary vendor news, funding, conferences and industry events. The podcast is hosted by myself and ex-Gartner analyst David Mahdi. We’ve received a huge amount of support and comment from the community and thanks to all who have listened and engaged. The most popular episode of 2022 so far, was episode 13 recorded at the start of November. The episode discussed the announcement of a potential $2.3 billion acquisition of ForgeRock by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The deal is expected to close in early 2023 and myself and David gave the acquisition a good analysis from the point of view of integration options with other Thoma Bravo portfolio companies and the potential impact on the rest of the market. The podcast is going from strength to strength and we’ll be adding in one or two interviews each month as we go into 2023.
The Cyber Hut’s Most Responded to Community Poll
The Cyber Hut regularly polls the LinkedIn community for some anecdotal feedback on thought provoking topics throughout the year. The results often end up in the podcast for discussion as well making the foundation for some of the free open source analysis articles. The poll (which admittedly was spread over 4 weeks) that attracted the most attention was asking where some key identity and access management components were being deployed. The question set focused on four key IAM areas – consumer, privileged access management, workforce access management and identity governance and administration. Some interesting results were written up for an article released in early November. The deployment models for many IAM services had been described the previous month – covering everything from on-prem through to managed services and SaaS. The results were interesting – some obvious, others less so, with plenty of opportunities for migrations and deployment consolidation.
Most Popular Inquiry Topics
I have taken hundreds of inquiry calls in 2022 – either in the form of retained services with long term clients, or in single one off pay as you go calls for venture capitalist, private equity and market financing research firms. Two main topics emerged – research on emerging trends and research on specific vendors. From an emerging trends perspective both passwordless authentication and external authorization were the joint top – with detail on use cases, the drivers for demand, capabilities, head winds and tail winds being the main areas being discussed. From a vendor perspective, Ping Identity, ForgeRock and Microsoft were the most popular vendors from the established “big 6” of Auth0, Okta, CyberArk, Sailpoint, ForgeRock and Ping. Demand for Microsoft intelligence has increased since the summer, likely since the re-branding of their capabilities to Entra – and the impact that may have on the market for both external and workforce identity.
The Cyber Hut’s Most Popular Training Course
I have completed several live, virtual, in-person and recorded training sessions in 2022 – from consumer identity, through to authentication, standards and value based metrics.
The most popular was the demand seen for a two day online masterclass held back in February on consumer identity market and technology overview. This was based on the best selling Amazon book Consumer Identity & Access Management: Design Fundamentals and attracted over 200 potential students. Alas, we only had capacity in February to train 50 – with an extra session held later in the year. Training on identity has seen a large uptick in 2022, and as a result some further courses are now being added in 2023 – including Authentication Design & Management and Designing Identity for Zero Trust both aiming to be available in Q1 and beyond – in both recorded and live formats.