Fixing Provisioning – Why It’s Time for a New Approach

By Mark McClain CEO & Founder, SailPoint

Last month, we announced a next-generation provisioning solution built on our award-winning identity governance platform. We've received an incredible amount of positive feedback on this strategic move, which validates our long-held premise that real change is needed in the identity management market. The decision to deliver a new provisioning solution was driven by conversations with our customers and our partners over the past few years.

It's clear that many organizations are struggling with their existing provisioning deployments. We continually hear stories of provisioning projects that have failed to deliver the expected results – even after many years of dedicating significant people resources and millions of dollars. Many companies shared with us that they're currently on their second or third failed attempt at provisioning because the products are too complex and require too much custom development to be useful.

As many of you know, SailPoint's heritage dates back to Waveset, and many of our executive and technical staff have deep roots in the provisioning space. While we're proud of what we built at Waveset, our understanding of the environment and the challenges faced by our customers is much deeper than it was 10 years ago. And, the technologies available to make the solution far more business-aware and easy to use are much more readily available in our Web 2.0 world.

That provisioning knowledge base, along with our recent pioneering innovations in identity governance, allowed us to bring to market a new and improved approach to provisioning. Our goal was to address three fundamental flaws of the previous approaches to provisioning:

1. Deployment Complexity: The solutions are too complex and difficult to implement for IT and security staff.
2. Lack of Business Context: The solutions are not business-friendly and do not enable line of business participation in identity management processes.
3. Technology Focused: The solutions focus too heavily on the technology (resource connectivity) and fail to address the need for business process management and business intelligence.

In short, we set out to "fix" provisioning! The result is SailPoint Lifecycle Manager, which addresses the business processes of user on-boarding, transfers and promotions, and off-boarding; and SailPoint Provisioning Engine, which automates changes to target systems to speed delivery of access requests, changes or remediations requested by the business. Designed from the ground up with business users and identity business processes in mind, this next-generation provisioning solution provides a better way to request and manage user access changes across the enterprise.

SailPoint has always been focused on helping our customers address their identity challenges in a meaningful, measurable way. With our new approach to provisioning, we believe we can help customers meet their business requirements in a way that is more effective, more efficient and much less painful. We can also help them focus their identity management efforts on business policy and the related business processes, which directly affect an organization's security, compliance and risk posture.

If you'd like to see the product in action, let us know. We'd be happy to schedule a demo for you. You can also download more product information on our website.

Smooth sailing,

Mark McClain
CEO & Founder
SailPoint