IGA in 2026: Key Insights from KuppingerCole Analysts Identity Governance and Administration Leadership Compass
19 May 2026
We are pleased to share that Nexis has been included in the KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass 2026 for Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). This report evaluates vendors that deliver integrated Identity Lifecycle Management, Access Governance, and Access Intelligence capabilities across enterprise environments. For organizations evaluating IGA solutions, an independent analyst report like this provides a structured reference point. For us at Nexis, it is an opportunity to reflect on where the market stands – and where it is heading.
Why Identity Governance and Administration Is Now a Core Security Priority
Identity Governance and Administration is no longer a back-office compliance function. It sits at the intersection of security, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency. Organizations that govern identities well reduce their attack surface, respond faster to regulatory audits, and give their business teams the access they need – without creating uncontrolled entitlement growth. The challenge is that doing this well remains genuinely hard. Enterprise IT environments are complex. HR systems, SaaS platforms, on-premises applications, and increasingly Non-Human Identities (NHIs) like service accounts and AI agents all require consistent governance. Most organizations have accumulated years of access decisions that were made quickly and never reviewed. The result is role sprawl, orphaned accounts, and SoD conflicts that are invisible until an auditor finds them. This is exactly the problem space that IGA tools exist to address – and why the capabilities of vendors in this space continue to expand.
Three Shifts Defining the IGA Market in 2026
The KuppingerCole Analysts IGA Leadership Compass evaluates vendors across a range of capabilities: target system connectivity, workflow management, access requests, access reviews, risk management, access intelligence, and API support, among others. The breadth of criteria reflects how much the market has matured.
A few shifts stand out from the report’s framing that resonate with what we see in practice.
AI-Driven Access Intelligence: From Add-On to Differentiator
The report identifies access intelligence – including ML-driven anomaly detection, entitlement recommendations, and risk-aware certification – as a key differentiating factor. Organizations are no longer satisfied with periodic certification campaigns that generate high volumes of rubber-stamp approvals. They want targeted, intelligent reviews that surface the access decisions that actually matter.
Non-Human Identity Governance: Why NHIs Can No Longer Be Ignored
Governance programs that focus only on human employees are leaving significant risk unaddressed. Service accounts, bots, and AI agents now outnumber human users in many enterprise environments – sometimes by a factor of 25 to 50. IGA programs that cannot govern NHIs with the same rigor as human identities have a growing blind spot.
On-Premises, Container, or SaaS: Deployment Flexibility as a Hard Requirement
The report acknowledges that cloud-first is not universal. Regulated industries – financial services, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare – often have strict requirements around data residency, infrastructure control, and integration with legacy systems. Organizations expect to be able to move between on-premises, containerized, and SaaS deployments without re-architecting their governance program.
How NEXIS Addresses Identity Governance in Complex Enterprise Environments
At Nexis, we are working on identity governance in exactly these environments. Our customers are typically large enterprises in regulated industries – banks, insurers, manufacturers – who need governance that works in practice, not just in demos. What we have learned is that most governance failures are not technology failures. They are data quality failures, process failures, and communication failures between IT and the business. A role or policy mining exercise that produces 10,000 candidates is not useful if the business cannot understand or validate them. This is why NEXIS is built around a few core principles. Identity Grids give business owners visual, understandable representations of who has access to what – without requiring them to read raw entitlement data. NICO, our AI co-pilot, surfaces the decisions that actually need attention rather than flooding reviewers with noise. And explainable AI helps users to understand tha acutal reasoning behind. Our data quality engine runs 20+ validation routines to ensure that governance decisions are based on clean, reliable data, not outdated records. NEXIS also complements existing IAM and IGA investments. Organizations that run SailPoint, One Identity, Open Text or other IGA platforms use NEXIS to add analytics depth, improve role quality, and support business-friendly governance processes on top of their existing infrastructure. This goes for human, but also non-human identities and AI agents. This approach – extending rather than replacing – reflects the reality that most organizations cannot and should not start from scratch.
The KuppingerCole IGA Leadership Compass 2026 is available on the KuppingerCole Analysts website (account required).
If you want to see how NEXIS approaches identity governance in complex enterprise environments, book a free demo and we will walk you through it.