IT Security refers to products and services that protect digital systems and data from cyber threats and unauthorized access. This category includes markets that focus on network security, identity management, data protection, and cloud security, enabling organizations to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and operate securely in a digital world.
Gartner defines identity governance and administration (IGA) as the solution to manage the identity life cycle and govern access across on-premises and cloud environments. To accomplish this, IGA tools aggregate and correlate disparate identity and access rights data, and provide full capability controls over accounts and associated access.
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) refers to a set of security practices and technologies designed to detect, investigate, and respond to threats targeting digital identities within an organization. These threats often involve compromised credentials, privilege escalation, or unauthorized access to sensitive systems. ITDR solutions work by continuously monitoring identity-related activities, analyzing behavior patterns, and identifying anomalies that may indicate malicious intent. Once a threat is detected, ITDR tools help security teams respond quickly by isolating affected accounts, enforcing multi-factor authentication, or initiating automated remediation workflows. As identity becomes a primary attack vector in modern cyber threats, ITDR plays a crucial role in strengthening an organization’s overall security posture.
Non-human identity management (NHIM) refers to the systematic approach of creating, maintaining, and governing digital identities for entities that are not human users within an organization's technology ecosystem. This encompasses a broad spectrum of automated systems, applications, services, devices, and processes that require authenticated access to networks, databases, and other digital resources to perform their designated functions. These identities, often called machine identities, are used to authenticate and authorize automated processes and secure communication across IT environments. They differ from human identities as they aren't tied to a specific person and often don't use traditional authentication methods like passwords or multi-factor authentication (MFA). Instead, they rely on credentials like API keys, certificates, secrets, and tokens. NHIM ensures that these identities are properly governed, have the principle of least privilege, and are continuously monitored to prevent unauthorized access and mitigate security risks. Typical users of NHIM include IT and Security teams, DevOps and Platform Engineering teams and Cloud Architects and Administrators, whose overall goal is to provide the same level of security governance for non-human identities as organizations maintain for their human workforce while supporting the automation and scalability requirements of modern digital infrastructure.
Gartner defines privileged access management (PAM) as tools that provide an elevated level of technical access through the management and protection of accounts, credentials and commands, which are used to administer or configure systems and applications. PAM tools — available as software, SaaS or hardware appliances — manage privileged access for both people (system administrators and others) and machines (systems or applications). Gartner defines five distinct tool categories for PAM tools: privileged account and session management (PASM), privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM), secrets management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and remote PAM (RPAM). Privileged access is access beyond the normal level granted to both human and machine accounts. It allows users to override existing access controls, change security configurations, or make changes affecting multiple users or systems. As privileged access can create, modify and delete IT infrastructure, along with company data contained in that infrastructure, it presents catastrophic risk. Managing privileged access is thus a critical security function for every organization and requires a specific set of procedures and tools. PAM tools focus on either privileged accounts or privileged commands.
Gartner defines user authentication as the journey-time process that provides credence in a claim to an identity established for a person for access to digital assets. User authentication is delivered by some combination of (a) an authenticator, (b) signals evaluation and (c) an authentication decision point, which may be from different vendors.