Increasing demand for Identity and Access management solutions
We currently live in a world where software applications have become an integral part of our daily work routine by helping us be more productive and allowing us to participate in the process workflows associated with our roles.
As the number of enterprise-level applications keeps growing as the nature of work becomes more digital, it’s not unusual for organizations to have several hundred applications deployed among their workforce.
All these applications need to be administered as it’s critical that organizations identify who can access them and assign the correct roles to the different users. Among the top challenges organizations face when managing such a large number of applications we have:
- The increasing number of applications makes it impossible to manage access privileges manually
- Staff managing access rights might not be aware of the risks of improper or conflicting access across different applications
- Poor oversight of security breaches caused by identity/access management deficiencies
Industry organizations and research firms cover this area extensively given its importance and evolving nature. Here are some recent findings they have published:
The enterprise solutions focused on these business challenges fall into the category of “identity and access management,” and the number of vendors offering them range from established enterprise software vendors to small niche players given the size and growth of this market.
How SAP can help
Given the large SAP customer base facing the identity and access issues we have described, and the ongoing need to meet regulatory compliance requirements that a typical SAP customer would encounter, it should not come as a surprise that the very first solution in SAP’s Governance, Risk & Compliance portfolio was SAP Access Control (AC), an on-premise solution designed to help organizations manage application access and ensure proper segregation of duty in the application roles within an organization.
As enterprise software deployment models evolved and more customers expressed interest in moving to the cloud due to lower total costs of ownership and faster implementations, a pure cloud-based offering from SAP was made available for such customers:
SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance (IAG)
This solution offers simple and adaptive access control. It helps improve access governance and minimize access risk and the potential for mistakes, misuse, or financial loss. It features a suite of purpose-built, integrated cloud services to deliver a better user experience in complex cloud and on-premise environments while supporting key compliance requirements.
Some of the key features in SAP IAG include:
- Access analysis service to reduce risks
- Role design service to enable optimal business roles
- Access request service to streamline access requests through policy-based assignments and workflows
- Access certification to review roles, user access, risk, and mitigation
- Privilege access management and workflow-driven monitoring
SAP IAG deployment options
SAP IAG comes in two flavors, addressing the two different deployment scenarios that customers will face:
- SAP IAG Standard edition – Option for new customers that are not already running SAP Access Control for their identity and access management requirements. Complete enterprise version, supporting both on-premise and cloud solutions.
Integration Scenarios - SAP Help Portal (SAP ID required)
- SAP IAG Integration edition – Option for customers to use SAP IAG as a bridge to extend their existing on-premise SAP Access Control to connect to cloud solutions.
Introduction - SAP Help Portal (SAP ID required)
Conclusion
With SAP IAG, customers gain a simple-yet-comprehensive, cloud-based approach to identity management and access governance that provides native integration with a superior user experience across hybrid environments. In addition, the solution provides the ability to adapt to the changing business needs of growing organizations while supporting key compliance requirements.
Call to action: If you are interested in exploring how SAP could help address identity and access management requirements in your organization, please let me know which areas you would like to learn more about.
