Identity has become the primary battleground in enterprise cybersecurity. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, credential misuse is the dominant method attackers use to compromise organizations. Yet despite billions spent on IAM technologies, most security leaders still can't answer fundamental questions about their identity attack surface.
An Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP) is a specialized security solution that provides rapid integration and unified visibility across an organization's entire identity and access management infrastructure. IVIP acts as an intelligence layer that discovers, correlates, and analyzes identity data from disparate sources. It creates a comprehensive view of both human and non-human identities, maps relationships and privilege paths, continuously assesses risk based on permissions and behaviors, monitors security posture in real-time, and enables automated remediation workflows. IVIP doesn't replace existing IAM investments; rather, it unifies them by providing the cross-platform visibility and contextual intelligence that individual IAM tools cannot deliver, enabling organizations to prioritize remediation efforts, demonstrate measurable attack surface reduction, and quantify identity risk in financial terms.
Formally recognized as a distinct category by Gartner in July 2025, IVIP addresses the critical visibility gaps that leave organizations vulnerable to credential-based attacks.
Why Can't Traditional IAM Tools Provide Adequate Visibility?
The problem isn't a lack of investment in identity security. Organizations have deployed sophisticated solutions including Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), Privileged Access Management (PAM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and plenty of Identity Access Management (IAM) platforms. Yet critical blind spots persist.
Each tool operates in its own silo, creating fragmented visibility that leaves security teams unable to see the complete picture. An IGA platform might manage user lifecycle and access certifications, while PAM secures privileged accounts, and CIEM handles cloud entitlements—but none of these solutions can answer questions that span multiple systems.
Consider a common scenario: Your SOC detects suspicious activity from a user account. How quickly can you determine all the identities, accounts, and entitlements associated with that user across your entire environment? Which systems can they access? What's their privilege level in each? Are there other accounts showing similar patterns?
Without unified visibility, answering these questions requires manually gathering data from multiple disconnected tools—a process that takes hours or days while threats move in minutes.
What Makes IVIP Different From Existing IAM Technologies?
According to Gartner's definition, IVIPs are "products that provide rapid integration and visibility for identity and access management (IAM) relevant data, typically paired with advanced analytics (often AI-enabled) capabilities. This innovation provides a single view of IAM data, activity/events, relationships, configuration and posture to enable rapid improvement of all other integrated IAM controls and capabilities supporting both improved security and business enablement."
In simpler terms: IVIP gives you the visibility your IAM stack never could.
Critically, IVIP is not another directory. These platforms don't centralize the storage and administration of all identity information—that would require duplicating massive quantities of data and hundreds of complex workflows. Instead, IVIP tools integrate with existing identity management systems to provide global visibility and risk analysis.
IVIP acts as an intelligence layer that makes sense of the identity data you already have scattered across your environment. It doesn't replace IGA, PAM, or CIEM—it makes them all more effective by providing the unified context they lack.
Why Is the IVIP Category Emerging Now?
Several converging forces have created the urgent need for identity visibility and intelligence:
The explosion of non-human identities. Machine-based identities like API keys, service accounts, cloud infrastructure roles, temporary workloads, and AI agents now significantly outnumber human users. Industry estimates suggest ratios ranging from 45:1 to as high as 100:1 in large enterprises. Yet most organizations cannot adequately track these non-human credentials; and every machine identity and asset relying on a cryptographic element across the organizations will need to be inventoried, evaluated, and ultimately upgraded to post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. For a large enterprise this means millions of assets.
Credential abuse as the top attack vector. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report identifies credential misuse as the dominant method attackers use to compromise organizations. The Identity Defined Security Alliance reports that 91% of organizations experienced one or more identity-related breaches in the last year. Of the 14 tactical areas described in MITRE's ATT&CK framework, five include multiple techniques for compromising and exploiting identities.
The shift from episodic to continuous IAM. Organizations can no longer rely on quarterly or annual access reviews. Continuous visibility, real-time intelligence, and immediate response capabilities have become essential requirements. The identity attack surface changes too rapidly for periodic assessments to provide adequate protection.
The impossibility of Zero Trust without visibility. Implementing Zero Trust security principles requires knowing exactly what identities exist in your environment and what resources they can access. "Never trust, always verify" remains an aspiration without comprehensive visibility into the complete identity fabric.
What Capabilities Does IVIP Provide?
Modern IVIP solutions deliver several core capabilities that transform how organizations manage identity security:
Unified Identity Discovery automatically discovers and catalogs every identity across the enterprise—from Active Directory and Azure AD to AWS, GCP, SaaS platforms, and on-premises systems. This includes humans, service accounts, API keys, certificates, hardware, software, services, and AI agents in one unified platform.
Relationship Mapping reveals the complex web of identity relationships and dependencies across the entire environment. IVIP helps security teams understand how identities chain together, exposes the true blast radius of a compromised identity, and visualizes the complete identity fabric—not just isolated accounts.
Intelligent Risk Scoring uses AI and machine learning to continuously assess identity risk based on permissions, behavior, access patterns, and toxic combinations. This enables teams to prioritize remediation efforts with quantifiable risk scores that speak to both technical and business stakeholders.
Real-Time Posture Intelligence monitors identity configuration and security posture in real-time across all IAM controls. Teams can detect drift, misconfigurations, and policy violations the moment they occur—not weeks later during an audit.
Advanced Analytics and Reporting transforms raw identity data into executive-ready insights with risk scores and financial risk analysis. Organizations can generate compliance reports, demonstrate security improvements, and answer board-level questions with confidence using data-driven intelligence.
Automated Remediation enables teams to not just identify risks but fix them. IVIP solutions can trigger automated workflows, orchestrate access reviews, and remediate toxic permissions directly through existing IAM controls with enriched data.
How Does IVIP Fit Within the Broader IAM Landscape?
IVIP doesn't duplicate or displace existing IAM components. Rather, it ingests and analyzes data from IAM, PKI, HR, and ERP systems. IVIP enriches the data and provides tools, reports, and risk scores that can be used by security practitioners and IAM managers.
Industry analysts divide IAM defenses into "prevention" and "detection and response" layers. IVIP strengthens both.
- In the prevention layer, IVIP supercharges technologies like Access Management, Privileged Access Management, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management, and Identity Governance and Administration by giving teams expanded visibility that crosses silos and new analytic tools to find and remediate more vulnerabilities and policy violations.
- For detection and response, IVIP solutions assist SOC analysts and incident responders in containing attacks and remediating the conditions that allowed them. If a user's passwords are compromised, IVIP can find other identities and accounts associated with the same user. If an attack exploits a particular vulnerability, IVIP can show other identities with the same issue.
Who Should Care About IVIP?
Gartner's Strategic Planning Assumption forecasts that by 2028, 70% of chief information security officers will utilize an IVIP to shrink their IAM attack surface. This broad adoption will span multiple stakeholder groups:
Security practitioners in IAM teams spend time managing processes for onboarding and provisioning users, granting appropriate entitlements, ensuring privileged users are protected, and monitoring user access. These teams can use IVIP solutions to identify users with excessive privileges, high-risk accounts that are orphaned or dormant, users associated with multiple uncorrelated identities, credentials exposed on the dark web, and violations of identity security policies.
Security practitioners responsible for PKI and cryptography who manage security for machine identities, software, hardware, and services reliant on cryptography. These teams can use IVIP solutions to identify machine identities and assets reliant on cryptography, detect systems running weak cryptography, identify assets unable to support stronger cryptography, and track overall readiness and compliance for post-quantum cryptography.
Identity management and security leaders including chief identity officers, VPs of IAM, and enterprise security architects can leverage IVIP to improve team productivity and effectiveness, identify and isolate identity risks across on-premises, multi-cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, prioritize remediation activities, and enable the transition to post-quantum cryptography.
CIOs and CISOs can use IVIP to accelerate cloud transformation, M&A, IT cost reduction, regulatory compliance, and post-quantum cryptography readiness. With IVIP, they can reduce identity-related risks, reduce spend on unnecessary accounts, mitigate staff shortages by increasing productivity of existing teams, prevent identity-related attacks and contain others more quickly. They can assess business acquisition targets for identity risk issues, document compliance with identity-related frameworks and standards, and assess, quantify, and report to the CEO and board on risk levels.
How Can You Learn More?
The formal establishment of the IVIP category confirms what security leaders have understood for years: effective identity security and governance require comprehensive visibility as their foundation. Organizations cannot adequately reduce risks they cannot observe. With IAM operating in silos, visibility capabilities can no longer be treated as secondary features embedded within traditional IAM products. Identity visibility and intelligence represents a critical, dedicated function that organizations must prioritize to defend against contemporary identity-focused attack methods.
Learn about IVIP and how you can use it to manage identity risk in your organization. Download the Essentials Guide to Managing Risk with Identity Visibility and Intelligence.
Additional IVIP Resources:
- Download the Gartner report “Reduce Your IAM Attack Surface Using Visibility, Observability, and Remediation”
- Register for a free FAIR identity risk analysis
- Request an IVIP demo