On the heels of the CrossIdeas acquisition (about which we have recently published a QuickTake), IBM today acquired another IAM cloud provider, Lighthouse Security Group. Its product and service, Lighhouse Gateway, is a small cloud provider that appeared in our Cloud IAM Wave and we were impressed by the "slickness" and ease-of-use of its customer interface for administration (policy management) and also for end users (Lighthouse Gateway provides its own front-end to ISIM and ISAM).

 

Now we recommend that IAM security and risk professionals should ask IBM the following questions about the acquisition:

1) How will IBM offer Lighthouse Gateway? Will it be an add-on to ISIM and ISAM licenses or will it be a standalone offering or both?

2) How will IBM integrate the beautiful user interface of Lighthouse Gateway into ISIM and ISAM on-premises offerings?

3) How will the new IBM IAM access governance ecosystem of ISIM+CrossIdeas be merged with Lighthouse Gateway?