The year 2012 marked the emergence of Single Sign-On in the Cloud, popularly known as IDaaS (Identity as a Service). Over the last 8 years, it has been established as the most preferred way to establish Single Sign-On; now called “Access Management” – a domain that provides comprehensive, ‘endpoint’ and ‘user’ based Identity Services.
Customer expectations and business needs have grown over time. The last few years have seen customers with the acute need for Access Management solutions combined with IGA (Identity Governance & Administration) Services – that contain user provisioning, role-based access control, Access Request, Access Certification, and other services that relate to back-end administration, compliance, and governance features. Industry players like Okta, PingIdentity, OneLogin do provide now ‘Light (or limited) IGA features that contain basic elements of Identity Administration, Governance being almost non-existent.
Yet, the recurring issue with IGA is its complexity. Thus, the challenges most organizations face are the deployment and management of IGA even when the technology elements are available. Conventional technologies such as IBM, Oracle, and CA have created process-intensive monsters in IGA, making organizations almost scared given how they often require special skills, significant capital, and enormous time to implement. Management of such systems is a separate ballgame altogether.
Besides, a modern enterprise’s wish list for Access Management would not stop at IGA functionalities. For example, IoT devices are beginning to proliferate organizations and many of these devices have poor authentication mechanisms with accesses that must be managed. Mobile devices pose the same challenge and include the need to factor data management.
Further, analytics and business are some of the biggest asks of governance but are today available only in very expensive IAM tools. In fact, this must be mostly procured as a third-party solution.
Mobile applications have grown as an answer to the poor ability of ERP solutions to meet the dynamic business needs of enterprises, but they severely lack user management and access governance.
All these demands are beginning to emerge strongly with no solution for IAM in sight, at least, till yesterday.
Cross Identity, with 20 years in the domain and having served thousands of customers, understood these trends 5 years ago. So, we went back to the drawing board, to build a solution that would be based on a common platform for Access Management & IGA. Besides, the solution has been constantly updated and incorporates emerging issues, be it in the area of IoT, EMM, analytics & BI, or mobile application user management.
CI emerged as a ‘Cloud Identity Platform’ from this drawing board. It has all the necessary elements businesses require to fortify their IAM system. Most importantly, it is simple and easy to implement as well as manage, besides being a cost-effective solution. It is then, not surprising that a popular analyst, Gartner, remarks, “CI is far ahead of the curve”.
