The background
The overview none of your systems has
Ask an IT department who has access to what, and the answer becomes a lookup across five different systems: Active Directory shows group memberships, Entra ID shows cloud roles, the HR system knows who is employed, and each business application holds its own local entitlements. Every system is the truth about its own small world – but none of them shows what a given person can do in total.
That is the gap an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform closes. An IVIP gathers identity and access data from all the sources into one consolidated picture: accounts, entitlements, roles, relationships and activity, across on-prem and cloud. On top of that layer, the platform applies analytics that find what the eye cannot: orphaned accounts, accumulated entitlements, dangerous combinations and deviations from the pattern.
The category
Why has Gartner invented a new category?
Gartner put a name to the category in the summer of 2025, when IVIP entered their Hype Cycle for digital identity. The definition, in short: products that can rapidly integrate with identity sources and create visibility into identity and access data, combined with advanced analytics.
The need is not new, but it has become acute. The number of systems keeps growing, machine and service identities are growing faster than human ones, and attacks increasingly target identities rather than infrastructure. At the same time, NIS2, DORA and ISO 27001 demand a documented overview of access. The classic IAM tools each govern their own part – but none of them is built to deliver the consolidated overview across all of them.
The category is still young. Gartner places IVIP early on the maturity curve, and the market consists of both specialised newer vendors and established players extending their platforms. That makes product selection harder – but the need the category answers is real enough.
The boundaries
IVIP does not replace your IAM tools
- IGA governs the lifecycle: onboarding, transfers and offboarding, requests, approvals and recertification. An IVIP does not move entitlements – it shows and assesses them.
- PAM protects privileged accounts: vaulting, rotation and session management. An IVIP can reveal privileged access the PAM solution does not know about.
- Access Management handles login: SSO and MFA at the moment of login. An IVIP looks at what the account can do once it is signed in.
- IVIP consolidates and analyses: one data foundation across all the sources – the layer each of the other tools is missing.
What does it mean for you?
If you already have IGA or PAM, an IVIP makes those tools better: the analytics show where the role model has grown crooked, which entitlements are never used, and where recertification approves blindly. If you do not yet have IGA, an IVIP can be a fast first step – the overview is in place within weeks, not years, and the data foundation can be reused directly in a later IGA project.
Whatever your starting point, the sequence is the same: visibility first. You cannot govern what you cannot see – and that is precisely the sentence the IVIP category is built on.
How good is your own overview?
We map your identities and access and show where visibility falls short – and what it should be used for.
