Gartner Magic Quadrants are among the most anticipated research findings of the year, released in different categories from the esteemed IT consulting firm Gartner. No matter the specific field, these publications receive attention from vendors and customers alike.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management provides a glimpse into some of the top vendors in the market, the tools they offer, as well as some of their strengths in the field.
What is Privileged Access Management?
Gartner defines the privileged access management (PAM) market as tools that “discover, manage and govern privileged accounts on multiple systems and applications; control access to privileged accounts, including shared and emergency access; and monitor, record, audit and analyze privileged access, sessions and actions.”
PAM is often equated with Identity and Access Management (IAM), a similar practice. In order to qualify for inclusion in this quadrant, vendors must deliver a service that features the following characteristics:
- Tools to discover, map, and report any privileged accounts on multiple devices, applications, endpoints, and systems
- A hardened, secured, and highly available vault for storing secrets and credentials
- User interfaces to review privileged credentials
- Tools to automatically rotate and manage credentials for service, administrative, device, system, and application accounts
- Support for role-based administration including centralized policy management
- Reporting and analytics tools of privileged accounts
Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management 2020
Here is the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management:
Results at-a-glance
In order to fully utilize the results of the Magic Quadrant, it’s necessary to understand each category:
- Leaders: Deliver a comprehensive toolset for administration of privileged access
- Challengers: Companies with an established presence along with a variety of product capabilities
- Visionaries: Innovators with a strong understanding of both current and future market trends
- Niche Players: Specialists with a hyper-focus on a small market
With these category definitions in mind, below are the results comparing last year’s Magic Quadrant to this year’s final results.
| 2020 Results | 2019 Results | |
|---|---|---|
| Leaders | CyberArk BeyondTrust Thycotic Centrify | CyberArk BeyondTrust Centrify CA Technologies |
| Challengers | ARCON senhasegura Hitachi ID Systems | |
| Visionaries | One Identity | One Identity Thycotic senhasegura |
| Niche Players | WALLIX Krontech Broadcom ManageEngine | ARCON Hitachi ID Systems Osirium WALLIX Micro Focus ManageEngine Fudo Security |
Dominant Leaders
There were a variety of changes in positions this year, although the main powerhouses in the Leader category remained consistent.
CyberArk
CyberArk remains at the very top of the Leader Magic Quadrant in 2020, thanks in large part to its long-standing and proven history in the PAM market and its huge variety of capabilities and robust product strategy. It is consistently at the forefront of innovations, resulting in an organization that can be relied upon to stay ahead of the market and its trends.
CyberArk boasts numerous offerings, including its Privileged Access Security solution, Endpoint Privilege Manager, On-Demand Privileges Manager, and Application Access Manager.
BeyondTrust
Making it to the second spot again this year is BeyondTrust, whose PAM solution Privileged Remote Access provides easy-to-deploy solutions for supporting admins along with a mature track record of unique tools.
BeyondTrust stands out from the competition as it offers multiple features that are not commonly found among other vendors, including:
- Trusted application protection
- Remote execution capabilities for running administrative commands remotely
- File integrity monitoring for UNIX/Linux
These products also excel thanks to their reporting and analytics functionalities, featuring templates that allow admins to create their own custom dashboards.
Thycotic
Moving up from a Visionary to a strong Leader this year is Thycotic. With a recent acquisition of Onion ID, Thycotic is in an interesting position to compete in the PAM field for SaaS, IaaS, and databases, which is traditionally underserved by most other PAM vendors. In addition, their continued innovation and strategic products have received attention, particularly their identity life cycle management for privileged accounts, which has proven to be a gap in the past for many PAM tools.
Thanks to repeatedly great feedback from clients about the vendor’s support and ease-of-installation, it’ll be interesting to see where Thycotic lands next year.
Centrify
Rounding out the Leader quadrant this year is Centrify, whose Privileged Access Service solution includes a full SaaS-based remote privileged access option, providing companies and customers flexibility with installations. Continuing their methods of streamlining the customer experience, Centrify also provides all of their manuals online without requiring any registration to obtain them.
With their strong roadmap and solid pipeline for new functionalities, Centrify will continue to demand a leading position.
Privileged Access Management in 2020
Thanks to accelerated adoption, the Privileged Access Management market only continues to mature. With many vendors focusing on advanced features like secrets management, just-in-time PAM, and cloud capabilities, the potential of growth will only continue to increase over the course of the next year.
Download the full Gartner Magic Quadrant to:
- Learn where the market stands and where it’s going
- Evaluate vendor strengths
- Make note of vendor challenges
Additional resources
View more Magic Quadrants:
- The 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for ITSM
- The 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking
- The 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing
- The 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services
- The Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM
- The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms
