SaaS Provisioning: It's About the Connectors!
Posted by Victor Barris on Mon, Jul 27, 2009
Last week,
Identropy launched
IC2, our Identity Management gateway for the
cloud. We also
blogged about the product and how it
empowers current User Provisioning Systems to seamlessly connect into
IC2 to manage the onboarding, offboarding and orphan
account reporting for SaaS applications.
The rationale for Identropy developing IC2 centers around one simple question:
What
is the easiest way for a corporation to manage the digital identities
of users for the multiple hosted applications that are not within their
enterprise control?
Although the move towards SaaS applications is a fundamental
paradigm shift from managing enterprise applications, the core identity
management problem surrounding user provisioning remains the same. After
conversations with our clients, it was apparent that the same business
processes that govern the onboarding and offboarding processes for
enterprise applications quite readily map to the same processes for
SaaS applications. Similarly, the same role management infrastructure
that is utilized for internal applications could easily serve up roles
for SaaS applications. Couple this with the following statistic from
Gartner's Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning):
"...as
of mid 2008, approximately 20% to 25% of midsize to large enterprises
worldwide, across all industries and sectors, have implemented some
form of user provisioning. An additional 20% to 25% are evaluating
potential solutions..."
Conclusion? SaaS Provisioning for most
organizations is all about the "connectors", or the little pieces of
software that connect the provisioning workflow engine to enterprise
systems like Active Directory, Oracle databases, and all the other
applications in your environment. That's where IC2 (Identity
Connector
to the Cloud) comes in. It's a connector gateway that speaks an
industry standard known as SPML. By using SPML, we could connect your
existing provisioning server to IC2. On the backend, IC2 connects to
your SaaS applications in the cloud. The net result is the easiest way
(think days, not months) for your organization's existing provisioning
server to extend out user management to cloud applications.