IDaaS Looming out of the Fog – or possibly Cloud
I had two different organisations wanting to discuss IDaaS yesterday – 200% more than normal!
I have one or two of these conversations a month, on average, so wondered if the landscape was changing at last.
According to Gartner it is – take a look at their recent paper on the topic:
“A Guide to Making the Right Choices in the Expanding IDaaS Market - 20 April 2012″
It states some interesting things, not least of all that SIs have now entered the market. That’s people like us!
Apart from the usual motivations such as Web SSO and Federation, the paper states:
“… based on Gartner client inquiries, some enterprises are interested in outsourced IAM, either partly, to handle the SaaS requirements, or to get out of direct involvement with IAM altogether.”
Which is hardly surprising given the level of pain experienced by many organisations when it comes to IDM implementations.
It goes on to say:
“These needs have driven the market to offer two primary models for IDaaS delivery: Web-centric IDaaS and cloud-delivered, traditional IAM.”
The “cloud delivered, traditional IAM” is clearly where the SI’s are entering the market and exactly why people are having these conversations with us now.
The report lists IDaaS providers that include a range of offerings from cloud ready vendor products (build your own IDaaS), Vendor X’s product running on a server somewhere and mature IDaaS offerings that do what you might expect them to do.
The simple truth is that an Identity and Access Management System with any level of sophistication (work flow approvals, SoD etc) requires work – a lot of work. The chalenge at the more sophisticated end of the IDaaS market is creating reusable/repeatable services that can accomodate these requirements while NOT becoming a custom SI gig each time. That would simply be IaaS with loads of services on top!
We’ll be spending more time with our heads in the cloud shortly – we’re very keen to talk to organisations who are considering IDaaS in any shape or form.
I’m keen to understand what your thoughts are on this topic and what problems you think it might solve. I’ll pay for coffee.
