On July 14, 2025, Gartner unveiled a new category in its 2025 Hype Cycle for Digital Identity report, Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms (IVIP). In doing so, the firm made an unmistakable statement: the industry’s fragmented, siloed approach to identity security is at the core of our identity challenges.
For years, enterprises have piled on Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), Access Management (AM), and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions, hoping that stacking tools equated to stronger defenses. However, the uncomfortable truth is that even mature programs really struggle to achieve full visibility at sustainable cost or speed. The creation of the IVIP category underscores what can only be called a fast- growing consensus in the industry: it’s now becoming quite clear that we’ve been practicing “identity security on a prayer” – trusting expensive tools without knowing whether they’re actually working, or whether identities are operating as they should. The tools are there. The visibility and full context has been absent, period.
The missing context in identity security
The fundamental issue isn’t a lack of technology. It’s that lack of context. Enterprises can purchase every niche identity security tool on the market and still have no clear, real-time understanding of what’s really happening and how. Are accesses broken? Are employees or automated systems performing actions outside their authorization? Is authentication missing or being skirted, whether intentionally or not? Without a unifying layer that integrates data, activity and posture across all identities, the answers remain elusive. And that means enterprises remain highly vulnerable.
This is where IVIP comes in. Gartner defines IVIP solutions as products that rapidly integrate identity data to deliver a “single view of IAM data, activity, relationships, configuration, and posture” through advanced analytics. In practice, that means an IVIP solution can map every access to a specific purpose, creating a constantly updated picture of who accesses what, when, and how. If someone logs in without proper authentication, or if an AI agent accesses a sensitive financial system, the system can immediately flag the anomaly in context. It’s not just another dashboard. It’s the missing layer that finally ties identity security together.
The urgency behind IVIP’s emergence is not theoretical. In the last year, enterprises have seen an explosion in non-human identities, led by the emergence of Agentic AI and including API keys, service accounts, bots and complex B2B environments. Generative AI systems and agentic AI are now issuing HR commands, processing financial transactions, and even potentially accessing sensitive intellectual property. Without comprehensive visibility, organizations have no way to know whether these AI-driven actions are being performed securely or if an overlooked misconfiguration has opened a dangerous backdoor.
And the same stands true for human users. Employees move roles, switch departments, or leave organizations entirely, creating what Gartner calls “mover/transfer activity” problems centered around gaps in maintaining least-privilege access. Even with robust IGA tools, these transitions often create invisible exposure points. Multiply that by thousands of employees, dozens of SaaS platforms, and a growing number of AI identities, and the risk seemingly becomes unmanageable without a unifying intelligence layer.
Silos are the enemy of security
Today’s identity security stack is riddled with silos. Each point solution may excel at its niche, but none can provide an all-encompassing, real-time view of identity behavior across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. As a result, organizations are forced into reactive firefighting. When something goes wrong, including a breach, a data leak, or an AI agent gone rogue, an organization scrambles to piece together fragmented logs and delayed alerts, often long after damage has already been done.
IVIP solutions seek to finally break this cycle by consolidating identity activity into that much-needed single pane of glass, correlating disparate signals into true intelligence. Rather than guessing whether access rules are working, enterprises can see the evidence themselves. Instead of hoping that a security stack is airtight, it can be verified or rectified in real time.
One misconception about IVIP is that it’s simply “another thing to look at.” In reality, IVIP represents a fundamental shift: from collecting identity data piecemeal to proactively enforcing security hygiene and detecting misuse before it escalates. By continuously mapping access patterns to legitimate purposes, IVIP empowers security teams to enforce least privilege dynamically, detect misconfigurations instantly, and uncover unusual or risky patterns regardless of whether they originate from a careless employee, a compromised account, or an unsupervised AI agent.
Consider a scenario where an AI-powered financial assistant begins accessing an unauthorized system to conduct financial transfers outside normal business hours. Or where a developer’s service account starts accessing HR records due to a misconfigured permission. Previously, these anomalies might not be discovered until an audit or a breach – and it would likely only be found months later. In an IVIP-enabled environment, these actions would trigger immediate alerts, supported by full context: which identity acted, what was accessed, how it was authenticated, and why the action deviated from expected behavior. This has been long overdue.
A long-standing market in the making
It doesn’t seem that IVIP is designed to be a fleeting industry trend because of its innate mission to paint the true picture with truly actionable context. As the number of human, non-human, and AI-driven identities grows exponentially, the demand for real-time, unified visibility will only intensify. IVIP is not a replacement for existing IAM investments, it’s the layer that amplifies their value, ensuring that every dollar spent on access management, privilege controls, or governance actually produces positive outcomes.
This is the missing piece that identity security has lacked for years. The IVIP market category screams that fact. Enterprises have been blind to how well their tools are working or whether identities are behaving appropriately because they lacked a coherent view. IVIP doesn’t just fill that gap – it finally allows an enterprise to act decisively and far more efficiently.
The debut of IVP is more than an addition to a Hype Cycle – it’s a wake-up call. Enterprises can no longer afford to operate on blind faith that their identity tools are functioning as intended. With identities colliding in increasingly complex environments, the stakes are too high for identity security on a prayer.
