Adding a Category to the Analyst Dashboard

Posture Management

The IT-Harvest Analyst Dashboard currently tracks 3,521 vendors in 17 categories. At the end of 2021 we noted the amount of activity in a subcategory of Application Security—API Securit—was getting a lot of attention with massive investments and accelerating growth in headcount. So we broke out the seventeenth category.

Now we are preparing to add an 18th category for Posture Management. We try to avoid adopting trendy names, especially when driven by Gartner which has a bit of an acronym inflation issue. But the terminology makes sense and it creates a good way to think about the old spaces of vulnerability management, configuration management, and asset management while including the newer subcategories of cloud security posture management and attack surface management. An alternative name for this category could be cyber hygiene, but that’s no fun. :-)

While most practitioners will agree that all these technologies fit into governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), the vendor themselves may object to being lumped into GRC.

We have begun the process of re-categorizing the 210 vendors that fit into this new category. Here is what the breakdown looks like at the the first pass:

With these subcategories, Dashboard subscribers will now be able to track investment, revenue, and headcount changes every month for each one. They can quickly observe trends and focus their research efforts. We still have 20 in the “other” subcategory so there is work to be done. There may be a need to include DSPM, Identity Posture Management, and others. Help us out if you have any ideas!