Sector spotlight: ITDR moves to Peak of Inflated Expectations

Gartner's May 2026 Hype Cycle for IAM promoted Identity Threat Detection & Response from Innovation Trigger directly to Peak of Inflated Expectations — a one-cycle jump that's unusual in the IAM domain. Forrester's parallel Q2 2026 ITDR Wave covers nine vendors. Alongside analyst-firm positioning, Forum Atlas watches two further signals for the same category: preprint volume for agentic-SOC architectures and vendor-blog mention frequency.

The Forum Atlas category-shift signal aggregates those three signals (analyst-firm category position, conference-paper volume, vendor-blog mention frequency) into a probability that the category will graduate to "established" within 12 months. In an illustrative run, a category with ITDR's profile — an analyst-firm promotion plus rising paper and mention volume — lands well above the graduation threshold. Driver attribution and full source citations live in the cyber brief.