The way organizations conduct business has certainly evolved over the past decade. Needless to say, CIOs and IT teams have a lot on their plates, something that only grows with the number of employees a business has on staff. With this in mind, more IT departments are beginning to turn to yet another application, one that helps them get control of all those SaaS IDs. It’s known as Identification Management-as-a-Service (IDMaaS).
Much of what companies do can be broken up into which applications they use, and the number of applications has grown immensely. Just think of the applications you use on a day-to-day basis. Most people have an application for email, a different one for storing data, another one for project management and some CRM service they likely use. Combine those with applications around team communication, client communication, financial management, and more, and the numbers start to get a bit overwhelming. Even more complicated is the task of managing all those accounts.
With all the applications floating around, along with the number of devices employees want to use to access them, is it any wonder IT personnel are looking for ways to make managing those accounts much easier? Not only does it save on headaches for IT departments, but it makes employees’ jobs easier as well.
How IDMaaS works
The name of the game here is greater efficiency, and IDMaaS manages this by allowing single sign-on capabilities. The applications used by workers are all pulled onto one platform, and employees can access everything they need by inputting a single password. Before ID management services, workers needed to memorize different passwords and possibly even account names in order to have access to everything they needed to do their jobs. Doing so across a few applications was more than manageable. Doing so across a dozen or more is a much different story.
In other words, using IDMaaS is very similar to converged infrastructure – it takes complicated pieces and compiles them into one usable core.
A product that makes management easier is no doubt something worth getting excited about. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that use of Identity Management-as-a-Service is growing in popularity. A recent report from Gartner predicts that IDMaaS will make up around 40 percent of all identity and access management purchases by the end of the decade. That’s a notable increase from the 20 percent expected this year. Businesses are clueing into the potential of IDMaaS; and as jobs begin to use more applications each year, the use of this cloud-provided service will grow with it.
The cloud impact
Another notable evolution that is contributing to the growth of IDMaaS is the change happening to the cloud itself. For most businesses, gone are the days when they use all their applications on-premises or on the cloud exclusively. Instead, most are choosing to go with a hybrid cloud, mixing together on-premises and cloud applications. IDMaaS helps with this process as well, still making sure all employees need is a single sign-on to access it all.
This streamlined management provides a major boost for IT teams as they exert control over all the employee accounts. It also makes it extremely easy for IT to add and subtract employees from the system. Instead of needing to go through each application and remove or onboard a worker, it can all be done from a central hub.
Another benefit of the IDMaaS approach is that it eliminates many security concerns, especially when it comes to employees leaving the company.
IDMaaS providers
With IDMaaS growing at an impressive rate, there are many services to choose from. Okta Identity Management is one of the most well known, but there’s also OneLogin, EmpowerID, Bitium, Identacor, Centrify Identity Service and many more. Each comes with its own features and capabilities, effectively becoming a decision that CIOs will be able to make once considering many different options.
Considering the direction most businesses are moving toward, adopting IDMaaS makes a lot of sense. With easier management, greater control over access, and improved security, we can expect the growth of IDMaaS to continue over the next few years and beyond that.
Rick Delgado is a technology commentator and writer. He writes for Business.com, CTOVision.com, SmartDataCollective.com and SandHill.com. Follow him on Twitter.