KuppingerCole Analysts

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412

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Aug 2026

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About the show

KuppingerCole Analysts AG is an international, independent analyst organization offering technology research, neutral advice and events in Identity Management, Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence.

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August 11, 202624 min

Analyst Chat #312: Is AI Killing IVIP Before It Even Matures?

IVIP, Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform, was one of the hottest acronyms to emerge from the identity market in 2025. But almost a year on, has it delivered on its promise? And more importantly, could AI already be making it obsolete before it even matures? In this episode, Matthias and Martin Kuppinger pick up where they left off and ask the hard questions about IVIP's future. Key Topics: ✅ IVIP revisited: still a set of capabilities, not a platform — and vendors are mostly relabeling ✅ Can AI make IVIP obsolete before it ever becomes a mature category? ✅ How AI is finally tackling IGA's oldest unsolved problem: application integration at scale ✅ Why IVIP falls short on action — spotting anomalies is not the same as acting on them ✅ IVIP, ITDR, and IGA convergence: does the category distinction even matter anymore? ✅ Strategic advice for IVIP vendors: observability, automation, and the path to relevance 🤖 "The MVP can frequently be done well with AI doing it at scale, manageable, as a real solution and not a set of homegrown tools? That is a very different story." Martin Kuppinger on why AI changes everything for IVIP — and nothing at once. 📅 Don't miss the KuppingerCole Analysts Identity Fabric Impact Day on September 9th in Cologne

August 2, 202630 min

Analyst Chat #311: Architecting Your Own Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is one of the most talked-about topics in European tech policy right now and according to Alexei Balaganski, most of the conversation is going in completely the wrong direction. In this episode, Matthias sits down with Alexei to challenge the assumptions behind the sovereignty debate, redefine what the term actually means, and lay out what organizations should really be doing about it. Key Topics: ✅ Why the "digital sovereignty" conversation has gone wrong — and what Alcatraz has to do with it ✅ The only correct definition of sovereignty: can you keep operating when a dependency disappears? ✅ Why sovereignty is just business continuity engineering — not a procurement decision ✅ How sovereign Europe really is today: the numbers are worse than you think ✅ Why "buy European" is a political preference, not a security strategy ✅ Decentralization, crypto agility, and distributed storage as practical sovereignty tools 🏛️ "Sovereignty is not about who you're buying from, it's about what happens when you can no longer buy from them." Alexei Balaganski on why the European sovereignty debate is asking the wrong question entirely. 🔐 "Nobody, not even the EU, should prescribe how to solve your sovereignty issues." A rare episode with almost no AI but possibly the most important conversation KuppingerCole Analysts has published this year.

July 28, 202632 min

Analyst Chat #310: AI Escaped the Sandbox - The OpenAI Hugging Face Hack (special episode)

When an OpenAI test model escaped its sandbox and attacked Hugging Face's production infrastructure, headlines called it a Skynet moment. But was it? In this special flash news episode, Matthias Reinwarth brings together four KuppingerCole Analysts experts — Alexei Balaganski, Jonathan Care, John Tolbert, and Martin Kuppinger — to cut through the noise and ask the real question: what actually went wrong, and what should organizations do about it? Key Topics: ✅ What actually happened: two separate incidents dressed up as one dramatic story ✅ Why the sandbox failure was a containment and design problem — not an AI apocalypse ✅ Jonathan Care's core argument: the breach was credentials, not packets — you can't firewall your way out ✅ Non-human identity and agent identity as the real unsolved problem at the heart of the incident ✅ Secrets sprawl, overprivileged service accounts, and the absence of least privilege for AI agents ✅ Was it a containment failure, an identity failure, an observability failure, or a governance failure? 🐯 "OpenAI had a pet tiger and the tiger escaped, Hugging Face was just walking down the street." Alexei Balaganski on why the most dramatic AI security story of the year was actually two separate failures. 🔐 Four KuppingerCole Analysts experts, one incident, and the identity governance lessons every organization needs to hear.

July 27, 202627 min

Analyst Chat #309: Fabrics Deep Dive II - the Identity Fabric as the Blueprint

The Identity Fabric isn't just a concept, it's a working tool that KuppingerCole Analysts advisors use every day with clients. In this second episode of the fabric mini-series, Matthias sits down with Martin Kuppinger and Phillip Messerschmidt to explore how the Identity Fabric and Reference Architecture are applied in real client engagements, why capability-based thinking beats tool-centric thinking every time, and how the fabric evolves to stay relevant in a world of constant buzzwords. Key Topics: ✅ How the Identity Fabric is used in practice: maturity assessments, gap analyses, roadmaps, and tool selection ✅ Why the right order always goes capabilities → services → tools — never the other way around ✅ What happens when tools are used for things they were never meant to do ✅ Why organizing teams around capabilities — not tools — is the future of IT operations ✅ The Identity Fabric built for 2040: long-term thinking in a fast-moving market ✅ How the fabric absorbs buzzwords like IVIP, ISPM, and ITDR — and why that proves the concept 🧵 "Every second day someone comes up with a new buzzword, the Identity Fabric helps you strip it down to capabilities and ask: is there really something new here?" Martin Kuppinger on why structured thinking beats buzzword bingo. 📅 This is episode two of KuppingerCole Analysts' fabric mini-series, the Cybersecurity Fabric and AI Security Fabric episodes are coming next. Subscribe so you don't miss them.

July 20, 202642 min

Analyst Chat #308: Beyond SASE - What a Real Zero Trust Platform Looks Like

Zero trust has a label problem. After more than a decade, the term has been stretched, diluted, and attached to products that don't come close to delivering what zero trust actually promises. In this episode, Matthias sits down with Alexei Balaganski, lead analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts, to share the findings from six months of research and reveal which vendors actually built a real Zero Trust Platform. Key Topics: ✅ Why zero trust is a strategy, not a product — and what that means for procurement ✅ The four non-negotiable requirements for a real Zero Trust Platform ✅ What separates a genuine platform from a collection of tools with a zero trust label ✅ NHIs, AI agents, and data protection as the new frontiers of zero trust architecture ✅ Three critical questions every RFP for a ZTP should include 🔐 "Stop looking for a Zero Trust Platform" - yes, really. Alexei Balaganski explains why that mindset shift is the most important thing a CISO can do before opening a single RFP. 📊 The KuppingerCole Analysts Zero Trust Platform Buyers Compass and Leadership Compass are both published: watch this episode first, then dive into the research.

July 13, 202619 min

Analyst Chat #307: Fabrics Deep Dive I - Why "Fabric"? The term, the idea and how to use it

Seven years ago, KuppingerCole Analysts introduced the Identity Fabric concept and it has shaped how organizations structure identity management ever since. In this episode, Matthias sits down with Martin Kuppinger, co-founder and distinguished analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts, to revisit the origins of the Fabric paradigm, explain why it still holds today, and preview where it's headed next into cybersecurity, AI security, and beyond. Key Topics: ✅ Why the Identity Fabric concept emerged in 2019 — tool sprawl, siloed IAM, and the collapse of the perimeter ✅ What "fabric" actually means: a capability-driven layer connecting all identities to all services ✅ Why capabilities should define tools — not the other way around ✅ How the fabric concept scales to cybersecurity and AI security architectures ✅ The fabric in practice: maturity assessments, requirements analysis, and target operating models ✅ A look ahead to 2040: why the core principles are built to last "The job of identity management is to provide seamless access for everyone and everything to every service" — seven years on, that definition still holds. Find out why in this episode. 📅 This is the first episode of a new series on the fabric paradigm, covering Identity Fabric, Cybersecurity Fabric, and AI Security Fabric.

July 6, 202636 min

Analyst Chat #306: Make or Buy? A Structured Framework for Smarter Tech Decisions

Build or buy, it sounds like a simple question, but for most organizations, it's one of the most consequential and poorly structured decisions they make. In this episode, Matthias sits down with analyst and advisor Phillip Messerschmidt, who turned his hands-on advisory experience into a structured framework for getting the make-or-buy decision right every time. Key Topics: ✅ Why "we can build it cheaper" is almost always a biased and incomplete argument ✅ How the originating perspective (business unit, IT, security) shapes — and distorts — the decision ✅ The most common and costly mistakes organizations make when going the build route ✅ When buying is clearly the better path: expertise gaps, speed, scalability, and vendor roadmaps ✅ Why security and risk must be part of the decision from day one — not an afterthought ✅ A structured, holistic framework for making the right make-or-buy call "This cheap solution can quickly turn into a security risk, an open attack, a breach — and much more cost than thinking about risk by design." Sound familiar? This episode is for you.

July 3, 202637 min

Beyond SOAR: How AI Agents Are Transforming Security Operations

Alert overload, 24/7 coverage gaps, and human threat actors who never stop — the SOC has problems that traditional SOAR and rule-based systems simply can't solve. In this sponsored videocast, KuppingerCole analyst Matthew Gardiner and Rick Bosworth, Head of Product Marketing at Torq, dig into the findings of KuppingerCole's Emerging AI SOC Leadership Compass and explore what it actually takes to build an AI-powered security operations center. Key Topics: ✅ Why rule-based SOAR has hit a wall — and how AI agents address what it can't ✅ The autonomy dial: why full automation isn't the goal and how to build trust incrementally ✅ Integrations, RAG, and MCP: the new data infrastructure powering AI agents in the SOC ✅ DIY SOC vs. managed providers: how agentic AI is reshuffling the build-vs-buy decision ✅ Where to start: alert triage, phishing, and typosquatting as low-risk entry points ✅ Guardrails, transparency, and the non-deterministic challenge of AI-driven security "AI agents hate people because they're slow" — but full autonomy isn't the answer either. Find out how leading SOC teams are finding the right balance between speed and control. This videocast is sponsored by Torq — featured in KuppingerCole's Emerging AI SOC Leadership Compass . Read the report, then watch this session to hear the findings brought to life.

June 29, 202620 min

Analyst Chat #305: IGA in 2026 - NHIs, Sovereignty & the Platform Shift

IGA is often dismissed as a mature, stable market but that couldn't be further from the truth. In this episode, Matthias sits down with Nitish Deshpande, to explore how identity governance and administration is being reshaped by NHIs, AI-driven intelligence, deployment sovereignty, and a wave of challenger vendors. Key Topics: ✅ How IGA has evolved from static, siloed tools to integrated, multi-identity platforms ✅ Non-human identities: IGA vendors are now covering NHI governance — and customers are demanding it ✅ Where IGA still falls short: role mining, anomaly detection, policy simulation, and workflow automation ✅ The deployment model debate: SaaS vs. on-premise vs. hybrid — and the feature parity problem ✅ EU sovereignty as a competitive differentiator for European IGA vendors ✅ What's coming next: real-time governance, access intelligence, and a new IGA report category 44 vendors evaluated, a surge of newcomers, and a market quietly reinventing itself — the KuppingerCole IGA Leadership Compass is out now and covers everything discussed in this episode.

June 22, 202635 min

Analyst Chat #304: Agents, Fabric, and the Unfinished Business of IAM, A Look Back at EIC 2026

Four weeks after EIC 2026 in Berlin, Matthias Reinwarth and Phillip Messerschmidt sit down to reflect on what the European Identity and Cloud Conference revealed about the state of identity and access management and what it means for the year ahead. Spoiler: agentic AI dominated, but it wasn't the only story. Key Topics: ✅ Agentic AI as a new class of insider threat — autonomous, non-deterministic, and without ethics ✅ Data-centric defense vs. agent discovery: protect the vault, not the crowd ✅ Why dynamic authorization and behavior analytics are the IAM industry's urgent next step ✅ Data sovereignty and geopolitics: eroding trust in non-European SaaS vendors ✅ AuthZEN wins the EIC Award — a standard built before anyone knew the problem it would solve ✅ Martin Kuppinger's closing keynote: "Everything we failed to solve in the past decades bites back now" "An agent behaves like a human insider threat — but without any sense of right or wrong." If your IAM program isn't ready for that, this episode is required listening.