Analyst Notes – IC Consult & ICSynergy, Open Policy Agent and Consumer Identity Market Explosion

A few items that have popped into The Cyber Hut inboxes over the past week relating to funding and vendor news.

iC Consult Group Completes Acquisition of ICSynergy

iC Consult, a European consulting firm focused specifically in the areas of identity and access management announced they had acquired US integrator ICSynergy. ICSynergy has been around since 2000 and is based out of Texas. They provide both IAM and PAM advisory services and LinkedIn lists 65 employees. Whilst an advisory outfit, they do have a “product” focus in the form of IdentityRM. This is a relationship management tool that looks to solve the complex interactions often found in the B2X business models – which perhaps many classic IAM platforms fail to deliver against. IC Consult is the bigger of the 2 organisations by a magnitude, with nearly 300 employees according to LinkedIn and a broad focus across both B2E and B2C identity deployments.

The Challenges of OPA?

OPA (Open Policy Agent) has been around for a number of years and has seemingly taken the lead in the popularity stakes when it comes to microservices protection and “policy-as-code” style architectures. The Cyber Hut recently did a technology test drive of the project with its highly capable Rego language and deployment capabilities. However, as the number of deployments rocket, a secondary overlay industry is emerging, with numerous services providing user interface, policy management and governance services based on OPA.

See PlainID, Cloudentity, Scaled Access as some examples, but that is by no means the entire list with of course the maintainers of OPA – Styra – providing an entire capability suite to support OPA.

A recent blog by authorization startup Aserto amplifies the talk track surrounding how policy code needs to be version controlled and distributed. An interesting secondary problem for those building more complex architectures with codified access control.

Consumer IAM market to reach $17.6 billion by 2026

Apparently the CIAM is going to be worth $17.6 billion in 4 years time. I can’t argue either way and I’m never really a fan of futurism when it comes to total addressable market sizes, however, there is no denying that…