Micro Focus Named an Overall Leader in 2020 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for IGA

Micro Focus Named an Overall Leader in 2020 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Identity Governance & Administration

Micro Focus has been named once again as an Overall Leader in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Identity Governance and Administration. KuppingerCole has named Micro Focus a Leader in the categories of Product, Innovation, and Market, as well as an Overall Leader for its NetIQ Identity Governance and Administration offering.

The 2020 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for IGA

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is an analyst report that provides an overview of the major IGA vendors and their product and services offerings. The report provides in-depth analysis of key capabilities required for identity provisioning and access governance.

KuppingerCole provides a comparison of products based on standardized criteria, leading to rankings in three areas:

• Product Leadership
• Innovation Leadership
• Market Leadership

In addition, the Overall Leadership rating provides a combined view of these three leadership areas.

Results for NetIQ Identity Governance and Administration

Micro Focus NetIQ Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) was rated an Overall Leader for Identity Governance and Administration, as well as a Leader in the three areas of assessment: Product, Innovation, and Market.

KuppingerCole also rates vendors at a more granular level in nine different areas, ranking Micro Focus as positive or strongly positive in all areas. Micro Focus received a Positive rating on Deployment and Innovation, and a Strongly Positive rating on Security, Functionality, Interoperability, Usability, Financial Strength and Market Position.

Key Micro Focus Strengths

Key Micro Focus strengths as noted by KuppingerCole include:

1. Strong, mature functionality covering all major aspects of Identity Provisioning and Access Governance
2. Aggressively moving to a more modernized and flexible architecture
3. Strong support for a variety of target systems
4. Strong support for IGA analytics and access intelligence capabilities
5. Very large customer base and strong partner ecosystem

Strong, Mature Functionality

KuppingerCole noted that, “Identity Manager and Governance products from Micro Focus (MF) remain leading-edge products in the IGA market space with broad, mature and evolving functionality.”

As a pioneer in the identity management space with over 20 years of experience, Micro Focus's focus is on helping the customers simplify identity governance and administration in their organizations, while providing support for complex requirements and environments.

MF does this by translating even the most complex identity processes into automated workflows. As noted by KuppingerCole, MF's “flexible and approach for workflow and policy management based on the designer tool is still widely unmatched in the industry.”

Micro Focus was also recognized for, “its distinct and improved governance features”, including “role mining, adaptive access certification, and risk-based analytics.” These capabilities are part of a unified governance framework that provides control over business-critical resources and empowers business users and automated systems to make better access decisions.

Modernized and Flexible Architecture

Micro Focus were particularly happy to see recognition of their accelerated move to a modernized and flexible IGA architecture. Its latest IGA releases include support for containerization, providing elasticity and simplified deployments and upgrades. Containerization is particularly important for true public/private cloud and managed service options where elasticity is needed.

As we modernize our architecture, we are also moving toward our first SaaS offering, planned for later this year. Our goal is to provide our customers with a smooth and easy transition from running IGA on premises to a hybrid solution. This includes the implementation of an on-premises bridge to provide a secure conduit between IGA data on-premises and IGA as a service. As we make these changes, customers will be able to manage IGA the same as they’ve always been able to, regardless of where applications and identities happen to reside.

To hear more about MF future plans for IGA, including the new SaaS capabilities, register for the Micro Focus Universe North America virtual conference to view the recorded session delivered by Rick Wagner, Director of IGA Product Management.

Broad System Support

Micro Focus  IGA supports a wide variety of connected systems through IGA drivers that connect information between popular business applications, directories and databases. The real-time, event-driven security architecture enables automatic, two-way changes to be made throughout the system, eliminating the need for periodic reconciliation and closing the gaps and potential points of abuse.

Micro Focus continues to invest in new IGA drivers. For example, a new Workday driver will be released in June / July that can detect changes in real time and trigger remediation processes to address governance access risks.

The broad system support also includes the capabilities across the entire identity and access management (IAM) spectrum. Customers don’t need to piece together solutions from multiple vendors; with solutions spanning access management, privileged account management, data access governance, and identity governance, Micro Focus can handle all use cases related to identity.

IGA Analytics and Access Intelligence

The KuppingerCole report noted Micro Focus’ strong support for IGA analytics. Last year, Micro Focus released NetIQ Identity Intelligence, providing risk-aware IGA analytics to all IGA customers. 

Identity Intelligence takes in multiple types of data, including current and historical state data, compliance data, and activity data. Leveraging this data, Identity Intelligence provides the following types of analytics:

• Risk-based Analytics – Peer group analysis and risk scoring to identify, assess, and remediate access risk.
• Governance Metrics – Governance trends and insights to identify process bottlenecks and adapt to changing business needs.
• Forensic Analysis – Analysis of current and historical access rights and events to quickly determine who had access to specific resources and how that access changed over time.

Identity Intelligence embeds the powerful Vertica analytics platform, a proven, highly scalable solution that is also part of the Micro Focus family. Micro Focus also plan to integrate predictive IGA capabilities from Interset, a behavioral analytics and unsupervised machine learning company that Micro Focus acquired last year.

Strong Market Presence

Micro Focus continues to have a strong market presence in the identity governance and administration space. 

As noted by KuppingerCole, we have a very large customer base and strong partner ecosystem. We are very thankful for the loyalty of our customers and partners, and continue to rely on their IGA feedback and insights to drive product innovation and customer success.

An IGA Solution for Today and the Future

The Micro Focus team’s goal is to provide a flexible, scalable, and powerful IGA solution that meets the evolving needs of our customers. Micro Focus have modernized the architecture, added great new capabilities like analytics and data access governance, and laid the foundation for a SaaS offering in 2020m and are pleased that these developments have led KuppingerCole to describe its products as “leading-edge” and to see as an Overall Leader for IGA.

Download your complimentary copy of the KuppingerCole 2020 Leadership Compass for Identity Governance and Administration.