More Thoughts on Identity Management Cloud Vendors
Matt Flynn has put together
a list of vendors in the Identity & Access Management space who have a "cloud offering," and Identropy was included on the list for our
IC2 offering. Matt described IC2 as:
Identropy IC2 - Identity and Access Management solution for SaaS applications. Leverages existing Identity infrastructure and work flow to provision accounts to cloud applications.
Here are my 2 cents: IC2 has less to do with Access Management (or traditional WAM) and more to do with Provisioning. In simple terms, it's a way for companies that already have a provisioning system in place that manages users for internal applications, to just plug into IC2 to extend management to SaaS applications (or technically speaking, any web application). So basically - as of today, IC2 is geared towards customers that already have Identity Management software in place.
Other vendors, such as Conformity (from what I know, Conformity, please keep me honest) have taken a different approach. They have a complete provisioning system in the cloud, including workflow, connectors, policy engine, roles, etc. So this approach puts them in the position of going head to head with existing IdM vendors, or target SMB clients who are searching for a provisioning system, but don't want the administrative overhead.
Identropy has take a different approach to the problem. By speaking to our existing customers (who all have provisioning systems in place, so our market research is biased! :), we saw a need for extending out user management (onboarding, offboarding, etc.) to SaaS applications. These customers would much rather leverage the infrastructure they spent a million dollars building rather than rip and replace the solution for a total cloud offering for Saas Provisioning and User Management.
An SPML gateway to the cloud seemed like the natural solution. It abstracts the technical details of creating custom connectors from customers. They also don't have to manage the connector, and it gets them up and running in no time, given that we already have a connector in place for the SaaS application in question.
