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.
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.
Workload Identity Management represents a critical segment within the broader Identity and Access Management (IAM) market. These solutions manage and secure the identities that organizations assign to workloads (non-human machine entities), such as applications (including AI agents), services, containers, VMs which require authenticated access to target systems. Workload Identity Management solutions deliver visibility into workloads, their identities, accounts and credentials, access policies, and their usage. They help enforce least privilege access and actively monitor for anomalous or risky activity. By continuously discovering workload identities, organizations can accurately inventory and maintain compliance with company policies and standards, as well as securely manage their associated credentials and access policies. These solutions enable organizations to discover, inventory, monitor, manage, and administer workload identities and any associated accounts, credentials, and access policies. The typical users of these solutions include IAM teams, cloud security teams, DevOps, and platform engineering teams responsible for managing non-human identities.