The market for Cloud IAM and in particular Cloud User and Access Management – extending the reach of IAM to business partners, consumers, and Cloud applications through a Cloud service – is growing, both with respect to market size and service providers. While there were a number of start-ups (such as Ping Identity, Okta and OneLogin) creating the market, we now see more and more established players entering the field. Vendors such as Microsoft, Salesforce.com or Centrify are already in. Now SAP, one of the heavyweights in the IT market, has recently launched their SAP Cloud Identity Service.
The focus of this new service is managing access for all types of users, their authentication, and Single Sign-On, to on-premise applications, SAP Cloud applications, and 3rd party Cloud services. This includes capabilities such as SSO, user provisioning, self-registration and user invitation, and more. There is also optional support for social logins.
Technically, there is a private instance per tenant running on the SAP Cloud Identity Service, which acts as Identity Provider (IdP) for Cloud services and other SAML-ready SaaS applications, but also as an interface for external user authentication and registration. This connects back to the on-premise infrastructure for accessing SAP systems and other environments, providing also SSO for users already logged in to SAP systems.
With this new offering, SAP is becoming an interesting option in that field. While they do not sparkle with a large number of pre-configured Cloud services – some other players claim to have more than 3,000 Cloud services ready for on-boarding – SAP provides a solid conceptual approach to Cloud IAM, which is strongly tied in all the SAP HANA platform, the SAP HANA Cloud, and the on-premise SAP infrastructures.
This tight integration into SAP environments, together with the fact that SAP provides its own, certified data center infrastructure, plus the fact that it is from SAP (and SAP buyers tend to buy from SAP) makes it a strong contender in the emerging Cloud User and Access Management market.