Celebrating Identity Management Independence

By Kevin Cunningham President & Co-founder

In March, SailPoint announced the release of our next-generation provisioning solution based on identity governance. Since then, I've spoken with dozens of companies about their views of provisioning – and discovered many who are excited about the new set of choices being brought to market. In effect, we're all celebrating "Independence Day" within the identity management (IdM) market.

Let me explain.

Most of the companies I've talked to are continuing to invest in IdM. They recognize the urgent need to evolve their IdM strategies to better address today's economic and regulatory requirements. And at the same time, they're re-evaluating their priorities and current projects, and taking a fresh look at new options that are more flexible, business-oriented and easy-to-implement.

We've seen a lot of changes in the IdM market over the past decade – driven by changing business requirements, the availability of new technology, and the benefit of lessons learned from the past (some of them very hard lessons). Provisioning systems provide a great example of this evolution. Originally created over a decade ago to automate user administration, legacy provisioning systems are now being outpaced by two factors: emerging identity governance and compliance requirements; and the need to model identity management as a set of business processes driven by non-technical users. First generation provisioning solutions don't easily accommodate business users and processes, and have serious functionality gaps that leave organizations struggling to keep up with service delivery and compliance demands.

If you're like many of the companies that I've met recently, you may be looking for the right way to steer your organization forward as market conditions evolve. Is there a way to declare your independence from legacy approaches without completely going back to square one? The answer to that question is a resounding "yes."

SailPoint's new identity lifecycle management capabilities offer an evolutionary path to provisioning success while leveraging your existing investments. This path can address your immediate pain and help you evolve over time toward a governance-based approach to provisioning. SailPoint IdentityIQ is designed from the ground up with business users and identity business processes in mind. Our lifecycle management solution automates and streamlines processes including user on-boarding and off-boarding, job moves, ad hoc access requests and changes, and remediations - while at the same time offering many choices for how you connect to and provision changes to IT resources.

SailPoint provides a flexible – and dare I say independent – approach to "last mile" provisioning by offering our own automated provisioning solution along with integration options for other provisioning methodologies, such as third-party provisioning tools, help desk systems, and even manual provisioning processes. This ensures uniform coverage of all IT resources from a business and governance perspective, without forcing standardization on a "one-size-doesn't-fit-all" provisioning process.

I realize that re-evaluating your existing identity management infrastructure still won't be as much fun as a backyard picnic or watching fireworks over a lake. But it doesn't have to be a multi-year headache. I truly believe that by offering companies more flexibility with identity governance and management, we've cleared a path to provisioning success. If you're ready to declare your independence, this newsletter has resources that will help you, regardless of where you are with your current implementation. I also suggest reading our latest whitepaper, "Provisioning Solutions: A Changing of the Guard," for an in-depth perspective on this new approach to provisioning.

Let freedom ring,

Kevin Cunningham
President & Co-founder
SailPoint