Gartner identified Okta, Microsoft, Ping Identity, ForgeRock, and CyberArk as access management market leaders in its recent Magic Quadrant report.

The analysis firm defines access management as “tools that establish, enforce and manage journey-time access controls to cloud, modern standards-based web and legacy web applications.”

It noted access management services should have core capabilities including directory services, internal and external access administration, developer tools, authorization, and adaptive access, single sign-on and session management, user authentication, API access control, and reporting.

The services also optionally provide machine identity management, advanced life cycle management capabilities, progressive profiling, journey-time orchestration in the context of access management, or other low-/no-code interfaces.

As organizations’ identity and access are becoming prime targets for malicious groups, Gartner expects access management will be converged into identity and access management (IAM) strategies. Along with identity threat detection and response, IAM resilience services will grow in importance next year.

The firm also forecasts the vast majority (90%) of organizations will use embedded identity threat detection and response functions from access management tools as their key way to mitigate identity attacks by 2026, compared to less than 20% today.

Among the nine access management vendors Gartner vetted in the report, the firm identified five “leaders”, One Identity (OneLogin) as “challenger,” IBM as “visionaries,” and Oracle and Micro Focus as “niche players.”

Gartner noted that Okta offers Identity Cloud as a SaaS-delivered converged IAM platform along with its authentication and authorization Auth0 Platform; Microsoft offers SaaS-delivered converged IAM platform Azure AD, which is part of its rebranded IAM product family named Microsoft Entra.

Ping Identity bundles multi-tenant SaaS, and single-tenant SaaS — PingOne Advanced Services into its access management product named PingOne Cloud Platform; ForgeRock offers Identity Cloud SaaS-delivered access management platform and Identity Platform sold as software; CyberArk Identity is also delivered as SaaS and the vendor recently introduced bundles for workforce and endpoint security, according to Gartner.