Imprivata

Imprivata is a healthcare-focused IT security company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, with a UK office, founded in 2002. It delivers authentication and access management solutions with strong emphasis on healthcare workflows and regulatory requirements. The company has over 450 employees, works with about 200 reseller partners, and serves more than 1,700 healthcare customers representing over 5 million users worldwide. KuppingerCole recognized Imprivata OneSign as an overall leader in Enterprise Single Sign-On, and Imprivata expanded into Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) through acquiring Caradigm’s IAM product line.

Healthcare presents distinctive IAM challenges: highly sensitive, regulated data; high turnover among clinical workers; complex and frequently changing role structures; and reliance on diverse healthcare-specific cyber-physical systems. Clinicians often need rapid access to multiple standalone systems across locations, each with different authentication requirements. Imprivata’s portfolio targets business-to-employee SSO and IGA with a goal of improving clinician efficiency, with many products delivered as Windows-based appliances and aligned to HIPAA, HITECH, and DEA requirements for strong authentication in electronic prescribing.

Imprivata Identity Governance integrates identity provisioning and access governance. Automated role-based provisioning supports onboarding, role changes, and offboarding; a cited merger case study reports major reductions in administrative labor and time to create accounts. A Provisioning Solutions Assessment service uses a half-day workshop with caregivers, IT, compliance, HR, and application specialists to design an automated provisioning model. Integration is addressed through a connector library (e.g., Epic, Cerner, GE, McKesson) and Bridge Studio, a graphical tool for configuring provisioning attributes and conditional workflows. Governance is provided via a GRC Executive Dashboard offering role-based visibility, remediation actions, analytics combining entitlements with actual access activity, and reporting plus certification workflows. Strengths include healthcare fit, connectors, and scalable RBAC provisioning; challenges include product-line rationalization and lack of federation and privileged account management, with no SIEM integration or risk analytics.

• Imprivata was founded in 2002.
• Imprivata is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, and has an office in the UK.
• The company has over 450 employees.
• Imprivata has a global network of 200 reseller partners.
• Imprivata has over 1,700 healthcare customers.
• Imprivata solutions support more than 5 million users worldwide.
• KuppingerCole recognized Imprivata OneSign as an overall leader in Enterprise Single Sign-On.
• Imprivata entered the IGA segment by acquiring Caradigm’s IAM product line.
• A cited merger case study reported a 99% reduction in administrative labor and an 80% reduction in time to create accounts for 1,100 newly acquired employees via automated role-based provisioning.
• Imprivata Identity Governance architecture combines .NET and Java (Jetty) services with Windows Server, Active Directory, and SQL Server components.

• “All modern organizations must support and secure a large number of enterprise applications, but for healthcare institutions the problem has some special challenges.”
• “Perhaps unique to the sector is its dependence on diverse healthcare-specific cyber-physical systems.”
• “Imprivata provides B2E E-SSO and IGA capabilities with a tight focus on optimizing the efficiency of clinical workers in the healthcare industry.”
• “To prepare a customer for the switch to automated provisioning Imprivata offers a Provisioning Solutions Assessment service.”
• “Bridge Studio gives customers' IT staffs a graphical wizard to configure application provisioning attributes without exposing them to the scripting complexity associated with connector development.”
• “Remedial action like canceling an access privilege can be taken directly from the Dashboard.”
• “The Dashboard combines information on user identities, roles and access privileges with data on actual application accesses to help auditors or managers spot policy inconsistencies or unusual activity.”
• “Imprivata Identity Governance is designed to handle large numbers of specific, compliance-driven roles, with users often assigned multiple roles that can change frequently.”
• “Imprivata falls a bit short of offering full IAM Suite functionality.”
• “An important near-term challenge for Imprivata will be rationalizing their product line.”