What Is an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP)? And Why It’s Becoming Essential for CISOs
Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Digital Identity, 2025 introduces a new category: the Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP). It’s an emerging layer in the identity security stack – one that promises to solve a challenge every CISO faces today: understanding what identities are actually doing across complex SaaS, cloud, and enterprise environments.
As cloud and SaaS ecosystems expand, identity has become the new perimeter – and visibility into every identity’s actions, relationships, and risk is now essential.
But what exactly is IVIP? Is it a new product category, a set of capabilities, or an evolution of existing identity tools? And where does Reveal Security fit in? Let’s unpack it.
What Is an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP)?
According to Gartner, an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform is designed to aggregate, correlate, and visualize identity data across multiple identity systems and applications. IVIP provides a unified, contextual view of every identity – human and non-human – and how each interacts with resources across the organization
Put simply:
IVIP is the missing visibility layer that connects authentication, access, and activity.
Where identity governance (IGA) manages who should have access and privilege management (PAM, CIEM) enforces how that access is granted, IVIP reveals what actually happens once identities begin to act. It unifies data from identity providers (IdPs), directories, SaaS and cloud apps, and enterprise systems to give security teams a single, correlated view of identity behavior.
Is IVIP a New Category?
Yes – it’s new in name, but not in purpose.
The idea behind IVIP has been building for years as organizations moved deeper into SaaS and hybrid environments. Identity data exploded across IdPs, IGA tools, cloud consoles, and application logs. But this data has lived in silos and none of these tools can answer critical questions like:
- “What did this user actually do after logging in?”
- “Which service accounts are behaving abnormally?”
- “Where are identities misused or operating outside policy?”
- “What is this identity doing and should it be allowed to?”
Gartner’s formal naming of the IVIP category in 2025 marks the recognition of this need – a new layer in the identity stack purpose-built for correlation, visibility, and analytics across the identity lifecycle. IVIP isn’t a replacement for IAM; it’s the intelligence that sits above it.
Is IVIP a Capability or a Product?
It’s both — and evolving quickly.
IVIP defines a set of capabilities that forward-thinking platforms are beginning to deliver as a distinct product layer in the identity stack.
A true IVIP must:
- Correlate identity data from multiple sources, including IdPs, SaaS, IGA, cloud, and application logs.
- Resolve “effective permissions” — who can do what and who did do what.
- Unify human and non-human identities.
- Apply behavioral analytics to detect anomalies and misuse.
- Visualize identity stories across environments for investigation and response.
Why Is IVIP Needed Now?
As identity becomes the new perimeter, visibility gaps are now the top security risk in SaaS and cloud environments. Attackers now use legitimate credentials, compromised tokens, and insider access to move laterally through SaaS and cloud systems.
Today’s identity environment is too fragmented and too fast moving for legacy identity tooling.
Without end-to-end visibility:
- Identity misuse looks like normal activity.
- Overprivileged accounts remain invisible.
- Post-authentication threats go undetected.
IVIP changes that by giving CISOs continuous visibility into identity risk — from login to lateral movement. This empowers CISOs to move from reactive detection to proactive identity risk management.
How Reveal Security Delivers on the IVIP Vision
Reveal Security is foundational to the IVIP category.
While others are just beginning to define what IVIP means, Reveal already delivers its essential capabilities today.
- End-to-end identity visibility: Reveal correlates events from IdPs, SaaS, custom applications and cloud applications to construct complete identity stories – from authentication to every cross-application action.
- Unified data and behavior analytics: Using ML and AI-driven models, Reveal baselines normal identity activity and detects deviations that indicate insider threats, compromised sessions, or misuse.
- Human and non-human identity intelligence: Reveal monitors both users and NHIs (APIs, service accounts, etc.), understanding how each operates and interacts across systems.
- Complementary to IAM and CIEM: Reveal doesn’t replace IAM, IGA and CIEM investments; it extends it with visibility and intelligence – the same purpose Gartner attributes to IVIP.
- Actionable insights for security and identity teams: Reveal turns identity data into decisions – which accounts to investigate, which privileges to remove, and which behaviors to watch. And it goes a step further to automate responses like user suspension, session revocation and other policy-based actions.
In short:
Reveal delivers what Gartner calls IVIP — the intelligence layer that transforms siloed identity data into enterprise-wide identity understanding.
How Reveal Security Helps CISOs Operationalize IVIP
CISOs seeking to mature their identity security strategy should view IVIP as the next logical evolution – the bridge between access management and threat detection. CISOs adopting IVIP principles are building stronger, identity-centric security programs. Reveal makes that real by:
- Providing end-to-end visibility from authentication through application activity.
- Correlating identity, privilege, and behavioral signals across applications and multi-cloud environments
- Detecting and responding to – and even preempting – identity abuse in near real time , before data is accessed or stolen.
- Empowering faster investigations with complete, contextual identity stories.
Reveal delivers what Gartner calls “continuous, correlated identity visibility and intelligence” across SaaS, cloud and hybrid environments.
The Future of Identity Security Is Visibility and Intelligence
IVIP represents more than a new acronym – it’s a necessary evolution in identity security.
As identity becomes the control plane for everything, CISOs need visibility that extends across all systems and applications, all identities, and every action.
Reveal Security delivers that visibility.
By connecting access and post authentication identity behavior into a single, continuous identity story, Reveal helps organizations move beyond monitoring access — to truly understanding it and confidently taking appropriate action.
Learn how Reveal Security enables full-spectrum identity visibility and intelligence.
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