Identity visibility gets its own category—and it's long overdue

In its 2025 Hype Cycle for Digital Identity, Gartner introduced a new innovation profile that will shape the next era of identity security: Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms (IVIP).

This marks a turning point for the identity market. For years, security leaders have struggled to achieve a unified view of access and identity posture across fragmented systems, tool sprawl, and poorly normalized identity data. 

IVIP validates what we at Axonius have envisioned and built toward for years: you can’t govern what you can’t see, and you can’t secure what you don’t trust.

And while others are now entering this space, we’ve been here from the start—helping organizations unify and understand their identity landscape, prioritize risk, and take action, all from a data-first identity foundation.

What is an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP)?

According to Gartner, IVIPs are platforms that “provide a single view of IAM data, activity/events, relationships, configuration and posture to enable rapid improvement of all other integrated IAM controls and capabilities.”

Said simply: IVIPs bring clarity to identity chaos. They integrate identity data across systems (think AD, Azure, Okta, Workday, AWS, on-prem apps, SaaS platforms, and more), normalize and correlate that data, and make it actionable through risk insights, automation, and governance context.

Why now?

Gartner identifies several forces driving this new category:

• Explosion of non-human identities: APIs, bots, cloud roles, ephemeral workloads, and AI agents are now the majority of identity types, far outpacing human users.

• Fragmented identity programs: Even mature IAM deployments still suffer from poor visibility, siloed data, and incomplete coverage.

• Data quality crisis: Identity programs continue to fail because the underlying data is inconsistent, duplicative, or inaccurate, making governance ineffective.

• Shift from policy to posture: IAM must now operate continuously, not episodically. Visibility, intelligence, and real-time action are non-negotiable.

These trends have outpaced the capabilities of traditional IGA, AM, and PAM tools. That’s where IVIPs come in and why Axonius is ahead of the curve.

The identity fabric is fraying. IVIP is the stitch that brings it together.

Axonius: Built for the IVIP era, before it had a name

While some vendors are now pivoting toward IVIP, Axonius has been quietly leading this movement by focusing on the foundation everyone else overlooked: data.

Identity governance is fundamentally a data problem. Without centralized visibility, normalized identity records, and accurate relationship mapping, every downstream control (SSO, provisioning, access reviews, role engineering) is compromised.

We believe the future of identity security lies in making data work for you, not against you.

Here’s how Axonius uniquely delivers on the IVIP promise:

1. Centralized identity fabric for all identities

Axonius connects to every source of identity data—HRIS, IAM, AD/LDAP, cloud providers, SaaS apps, device managers, and more—and correlates that data into a single unified identity model. This model spans:

• Human and non-human identities

• Cloud roles, workloads, ephemeral tokens

• Service accounts, secrets, and machine identities

• Application-to-application access relationships

Instead of siloed views or brittle joins, Axonius builds a flexible identity fabric that understands who has access, how they got it, and whether they should.

2. Data normalization and cleansing at scale

Bad data is the “silent killer” of IAM. Inaccurate records, stale accounts, mismatched entitlements; these issues lead to over-provisioning, failed access reviews, and blind spots attackers exploit.

Gartner emphasizes that most organizations are still only “partly integrated” after years of investment. Axonius fixes this by:

• Accelerating time to value with our 1,200+ out-of-the-box integrations/adapters

• Correlating identity data across disconnected systems

• Resolving duplicate and orphaned accounts

• Unifying entitlement models across apps

• Building clean, queryable, extensible identity records

This normalized dataset becomes the foundation for everything else: risk scoring, policy enforcement, remediation, and governance.

3. Risk insights you can act on

Seeing who has access is just the start. The real value of IVIP is in surfacing what’s risky, what’s broken, and what needs to be fixed.

Axonius delivers this with:

• Excessive access detection through peer group analysis

• Toxic combination exposure (e.g., SSO bypass + lack of MFA + stale tokens)

• Machine identity drift, usage anomalies, and orphaned service accounts

• Access graph intelligence showing entitlements across systems and paths

• AI-based recommendations for role mining and rule recommendations based on profound data analysis

4. Unified governance, simplified

Many vendors treat visibility and governance as separate. Axonius doesn’t. We unify identity insights with policy enforcement and governance workflows:

• Automatically generate and scope access reviews based on risk or app sensitivity

• Trigger de-provisioning actions based on rules or policy violations

• Integrate with IGA tools, or replace them entirely where needed

Whether you’re augmenting legacy governance or building from scratch, Axonius gives you the building blocks to do it with confidence.

The identity illusion: Why IAM without data is a false sense of security

For years, security programs have thrown more tools at the identity problem: IGA for provisioning and certification, SSO for authentication, PAM for privilege management. But many of these tools were designed to enforce policy, not verify posture.

That’s a dangerous gap.

Just because you’ve rolled out SSO doesn’t mean users aren’t bypassing it. And just because you have MFA policies doesn’t mean they’re actually enforced on every login.

Too often, organizations assume that if a system logs access or a user has an account, then all is well. But data tells a different story:

• Former employees with active tokens

• Service accounts with no ownership

• Overlapping entitlements that violate SoD policies

• Orphaned identities persisting across cloud workloads

The illusion of security stems from relying on control surfaces that are blind to what’s underneath.

That’s why Axonius puts identity data at the core of governance. We don’t just rely on what IAM systems believe to be true; we validate it against live, correlated, real-world identity activity across your environment.

Governance should not be a spreadsheet exercise.
Security should not be theoretical.
And visibility should not stop at your SSO dashboard.

IVIP is a wake-up call: You can’t govern what you can’t see

IVIP shines a spotlight on a hard truth: IAM can’t keep up with a reality it doesn’t understand. 

Gartner recognizes that solving this reality requires a new kind of platform. One that starts with data and ends in action. And one that spans the entire identity lifecycle across every identity.

At Axonius, we’re proud to be recognized as a representative vendor in this new category. But more importantly, we’re proud to be helping our customers actually solve the problems IVIP was created to address.

Because identity is not just a source of truth.

It’s a source of risk, and a source of power.

Ready to see how Axonius Identities fits into your identity fabric? Book a demo of Axonius Identities.