BANGALORE, INDIA: A recent study by Gartner stated that Worldwide Identity and Access Management (IAM) revenue will reach $9.9 billion in 2010, an eight per cent increase from 2009 revenue of $9.2 billion.

The report made by data based on interactions with clients at Gartner IAM Summits in 2009 in North America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) stated that IAM market is estimated to grow to $11.9 billion by the end of 2013, and compliance, audit and analytics requirements continue to be the main factors influencing investments in IAM, alongside operational efficiency and better integration across IAM solutions.

Ruggero Contu, principal research analyst at Gartner. "IAM technology is a critical component of enterprises' security strategies, and Gartner clients have indicated that approximately eight per cent of their security budgets are dedicated to IAM."

IAM functionality delivered as a service is still in its early stages with survey respondents indicating that between one and five per cent of their IAM budget are spent on IAM technologies purchased under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) agreement. However, driven by economic and technological factors, and the expanding availability of SaaS and cloud computing, purchase of IAM functionality delivered as a SaaS is expected to accelerate over the coming years.

"A hierarchy of IAM-as-a-service requirements will evolve over the coming years, beginning with basic authentication and access management needs and progressing to provisioning and administration functionality," said Contu.

Gartner further predicts that cloud-computing "construction" for private clouds will require specific IAM-as-a-service functionality to accommodate scale and standardized-delivery needs. Public cloud computing will drive IAM standards, with multiple vendors vying for the role of "toolkit providers" for both the public and private clouds. "This will be increasingly important as a means of meeting requirements related to credential management and licensing models for use, and we can expect that new vendors will enter the IAM-as-a-service market from unexpected segments." said Contu.

More established mature tools were mentioned alongside emerging products and among areas showing the highest interest were role-based access, followed by single sign-on. Within the more-emerging IAM technologies, products relating to privileged accounts management and entitlement management appeared to be of the highest criticality.

Suite-based IAM technology currently appears to be the most-preferred product type for organizations and looks set to become even more prevalent in purchasing strategies. Almost 40 per cent of companies interviewed indicated this preference during the next couple of years, together with an increasing reliance on managed security services and consulting services for IAM.