SailPoint Helps Companies Proactively Mitigate Risk While Adopting Enterprise Cloud
June 11, 2012
As enterprises accelerate their adoption of cloud computing, they must cope with the challenges of managing a hybrid IT environment where some applications reside on-premises and some reside in the cloud. Adding to the complexity of this evolution, business units are gaining more autonomy to buy and deploy applications — which can often house sensitive, corporate data — without consulting or involving the IT organization. Based on a recent survey, Gartner predicted that 35 percent of all application spend will originate outside of IT by 2015, and that 50 percent of companies will have mission-critical data in the cloud by 2016. While more and more companies are now reaping the benefits of cloud computing, they are increasingly struggling to ensure that proper IT controls are in place to address the potential risks.
"Cloud applications give business users the freedom and autonomy to procure and use software, but they make identity management more complex and difficult for the IT organization," said Jackie Gilbert, VP and GM of SailPoint’s Cloud Business Unit. "As we worked with customers to address cloud identity management requirements, we realized that one of the biggest challenges with delivering governance and control for cloud applications is doing so in a way that does not impede the business. The right identity management strategy allows organizations to mitigate risk and meet compliance requirements while also providing valuable services to the business. This helps IT align with the cloud’s core value propositions of convenience and simplicity for the business."…
To address the real issues enterprises are encountering around cloud identity management, today SailPoint extended its product portfolio to bridge the gap between the enterprise and cloud applications (see related release:SailPoint Announces Integrated Cloud Identity Management Solution for the Enterprise). SailPoint AccessIQ(TM) integrates seamlessly with the company’s governance-based identity management solution, SailPoint IdentityIQ(TM), to deliver easy-to-use access management for the cloud combined with enterprise-class governance and controls. With AccessIQ and IdentityIQ, SailPoint provides the bridge between on-premises IT and cloud environments, allowing enterprises to leverage their identity management infrastructure to effectively manage cloud applications. By combining cloud access management with identity governance and provisioning, enterprises can give business users the agility and convenience they want, while giving IT the visibility and control that is essential to effectively managing IT risk.
"Many vendors are talking about ‘cloud identity management,’ but that often translates to simple ‘cloudwashing’ – reframing their product messaging to take advantage of cloud hype," continued Gilbert. "Several identity management vendors are attempting to address cloud identity management by hosting their existing products as a cloud service, which is not ideal for the world’s largest enterprises. Other vendors are touting web single-sign on capabilities as a complete identity and access management solution for the cloud, but in reality they don’t provide enterprise-class provisioning or identity governance. And importantly, these standalone SSO solutions increase complexity and cost for the enterprise."
SailPoint’s President Kevin Cunningham added: "Our customers clearly see the need for more visibility and control over cloud apps, but in order to get buy-in from business users, they need a new approach. In the past, many companies attempted to ‘lock down’ their technology environments to block usage of technology not managed by IT, but by 2012, we’ve outgrown this ‘one size fits all’ approach. As enterprises give workers more choice and empowerment, they need more flexible ways to manage users and their access to cloud applications. With SailPoint, they can apply different levels of policy and controls for different applications, depending on whether they already have IT oversight, are procured at the line of business or departmental level perhaps unseen by IT, or are personally subscribed to by individual users."
SailPoint is committed to driving innovation around identity management in the cloud. The company was an early driver of the SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management, formerly know as Simple Cloud Identity Management) standard and continues to lead the specification’s development. SailPoint also created a Cloud Business Unit to focus on and develop solutions to address cloud computing challenges for its enterprise customers. In January, the company acquired Cloudmasons, a developer of cloud and mobile access management solutions, to further accelerate the growth of the business unit.