The Business Value of Cloud-Based Identity Security

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar, Business Value of Cloud-Based Identity Security. I am Nitish Deshpande, Research Analyst at KuppingerCole and today I'm joined by Chris Gossett. Chris is Senior Vice President of Technology Services at SailPoint. Before we begin, there are some housekeeping points. So you all are centrally muted. We are all controlling this centrally so you don't need to mute or unmute yourself during the entire webinar.

We will run a few polls during this webinar and you will see the results during the Q&A session which will take place in the last 20 minutes of the webinar. So I encourage everyone to take part in these polls and cast your votes. The Q&A session towards the end will take place and you can enter your questions during the webinar at any time by going to the GoToWebinar control panel and finally this webinar is being recorded and we will share this recording and the presentation slide deck with you in the coming days.

In today's webinar, we will begin with identifying what are the challenges of legacy systems. The best practices for migrating to cloud-based identity security solutions as well as what are the key drivers that are forcing organizations to move to cloud-based solutions. Next we have Chris Gossett who will then explain the business value of cloud-based identity security as well as SailPoint's overview of identity security cloud upgrade program and finally we'll have the discussion and the Q&A session. So before we begin, we have a poll for you. So we will run two polls.

This is the first one and it is how is identity security deployed in your organization? Is it A.

Cloud, B. On-premises, C. Hybrid or D. None. I think now we can give you you have under 30 seconds to cast your votes so please go ahead.

Okay, thank you for your votes. I'm looking forward to seeing the results during the Q&A session and we can now begin towards the actual webinar. Before we go into detail about the cloud-based identity security solutions, it's important to know what are the challenges of the current legacy systems and also how can the cloud-based solutions provide advantages over legacy systems. As currently more and more identities are created, the organizations have to take care of millions of identities so this has moved beyond human capacity.

You need AI tools for automation so legacy systems are currently being challenged in this section. Also legacy systems are difficult to maintain. You need a dedicated team to maintain these solutions and they're also costly. Let's take a look at the challenges in more detail. So one of the challenges about legacy systems is digital transformation. As explained, in the current world, organizations are moving more towards the digital world so organizations need to be equipped and educated about how they can achieve this. Legacy systems are currently not equipped to tackle this solution.

Next is upgrade fatigue due to the need for new features or security updates. It's quite a lengthy process and software solutions to patch new features and security features. Also you have staffing issues around legacy systems. You need a dedicated team to run and maintain the software. Then you have the limited scalability of software solutions. They are not flexible enough so they're not ideal for future organizational growth. And then you have higher management costs so when you need a dedicated team you have higher end management costs associated with that when compared to cloud solutions.

And finally it's the corporate initiative. So when you want to move towards the cloud solution it's quite important to first align with the key stakeholders within the organization and this is one of the challenges. So who takes the initiative? Most of the organizations don't know where to even begin so that is one of the challenges. Next we can see how a cloud-based solution provides advantages over these. In a cloud-based solution you have continuous delivery of updates and they're rapid. Next the cloud-based solution is outsourced. You don't need an expert team within the organization.

This in turn also saves the total cost of ownership. Then you have cloud-based solutions are also flexible. They are multi-tenant and can provide scalability options. Again a cloud-based solution means no in-house infrastructure so this reduces total cost of ownership again. What are the key drivers for moving to the cloud? The current trend that we are observing is that these four trends are responsible drivers are responsible for moving to the cloud. So you have digital transformation as I mentioned earlier. Then lower cost legacy systems are quite costly to maintain.

Then improved security cloud-based solutions provide improved security. You can provision de-provision access immediately and finally AI-driven automation. When moving to cloud-based solutions there are a few best practices which you can follow and they are first you need to define a target operating model. You need to identify the gaps the requirements within your organization and also you need to consider the total cost of ownership for migration.

Once you have identified the gaps and the requirements you have to evaluate the potential candidates based upon your requirements and select a provider. Also it's important to consider technical and financial factors when selecting a provider. We know one-size-fits-all solution is not possible so you need to prioritize what you need first. Then it's about planning the migration. Identify all the entities and resources that will be affected in this migration. Determine a pilot migration program and in the beginning just start proving around to create trust.

Once you have established this trust and then you can move towards the actual migration. Once you are in this process you can decommission the legacy systems. So sunset legacy systems and in this process also check for orphan accounts to eliminate further data breach risks. During this entire process you need to ensure data protection. So evaluate potential data loss and data breach points and also ensure data protection when you're migrating from legacy to cloud. So you can provide different options based on such as archiving or backup.

Once you have the solution in place it's important to have a team that is trained enough to tackle the new features of this solution. So operating in an observation monitoring mode is crucial and then evaluating and measuring the results of the migration. Now we come to the second poll. What would be the driving factor for your organization to move to cloud-based identity security? Is it a digital transformation, b improved security, c lower cost or d all of the above? I think you can now cast your votes. The poll is open. The poll is open. Again another 20 to 30 seconds.

Okay I think that's it. So thank you everyone again for your votes. We will discuss the results in the final Q&A session. Now moving on I would like to invite Chris. So Chris. Hello everyone. As Nitish said thank you very much for joining us. I really am looking forward to the rest of the webinar and especially the Q&A session later on. As I just said I'm Chris Gossett. I'm the Senior Vice President of Technology Services here at SailPoint Technologies.

I've spent the last 23 years of my career in the identity space and one of the most exciting things I got to do was help SailPoint develop our SaaS service identity now when we launched it probably about nine years ago. And one of the things I'm doing today which I'm very excited about is leading a team that helps our on-premise customers navigate their solutions to the cloud. So today I thought I'd share a little bit of that journey a little bit of what we've learned as a company and a little bit of trends in the market that we're seeing from customers as they're moving to SaaS.

So I've got some slides we'll just walk through this again. I think there's a Q&A here at the end so if you have some questions along the way please make sure you write those down. We're happy to answer them as we go along. So really there are these four pillars that are important as you as we've seen customers migrate to cloud right architecture, security, cost, deployment, and release schedules. And we'll dive into these in detail in the next few slides but as we're going through this those are the things I think to keep in mind if you're considering this move.

So we look into architecture one of the first questions we get a lot is you know can I just move my on-premise system to be cloud hosted? Many customers we engage with as you saw earlier have digital transformation efforts they're hearing from their broader business we want everything out of the data center and it's tempting sometimes to think you know maybe the right answer is just lift and shift if you will to the cloud.

That is can be a viable option for some customers you know it does move things out of the data center it may make things more congruent with the rest of the organization as far as where you know systems are being hosted and and things are being managed. Unfortunately it is while it is a step towards kind of cloud transformation or digital transformation it's often an insufficient one.

A lot of the challenges that you heard earlier around legacy software still remain it can be more expensive than running these in your own data center and it still requires that deep expertise both now on the software that you may be running and then also on the cloud technology that it's hosted in. The next click that we often hear from customers is a switch to hybrid and this really can be that kind of incremental step well maybe I'll run my legacy system on-premise and I'll get a cloud system or maybe a cloud hosted system as a step towards the cloud.

This can work well and we do see some customers having success with this specifically customers that have a very complex identity security environment or customers that have been in we're using identity security for a long time right if you think you've been doing this for 15 years you have thousands of systems under management you may need multiple steps to get to the cloud and this can work really nice.

The downside to this of course is that you now are maintaining two different systems and you know sometimes we would say paying two mortgages where you're as you're moving houses and so we work with customers often to try to limit this step as kind of an interim solution that may be viable for a year or 18 months but probably isn't the long-term answer for most of the customers we're working with.

The final step and you know we obviously think is the best and we'll spend some time diving into why is really a multi-tenant SaaS solution right and one of the things is you're looking for this you know it's there are multiple approaches to this some multi-tenant SaaS solutions are in the identity space are very limited and that may be fine for very limited customers but what we see is that most customers outgrow those solutions fairly quickly.

You want to find one that can model complex business processes that can really focus on flexibility that's designed to scale with your business not just from the number of identities and systems under management but also can change as your business changes.

One of the key lessons I think we've learned at SailPoint over the years is that business is never static there's M&A divestitures reorganizations changes and if you have a very limited and brittle identity solution that's going to be painful as the business moves on so looking for a solution that can really be flexible and scale is very very important and there's some really nice benefits to this and again we'll go through this in the next few slides but moving to multi-tenant SaaS really frees up your team to work on the actual identity program as opposed to having to be experts in databases or cloud technologies or application servers or complex configurations or Java or Perl or whatnot so that's really one of the big drivers we see from customers and one of the big benefits that they're getting as they move to SaaS and then lastly it's just a modern approach this really is setting customers that are choosing this route on a very modern platforms that allow them to be able to have that technology in place for many many years to come.

I really like this graph and this is showing really two things if you look here on the bottom it's time and on the on the y-axis we're looking at features and this really kind of highlights some of the challenges with that cloud hosted approach or maybe the hybrid approach if you're in this kind of upgrade cycle and you're spending more and more time configuring the solution and maintaining the database and maintaining some of the things that I would call not an identity program configuration but kind of just the I'm working to keep my system up to date you're really on that blue line right and that while you can add more features you can increase your identity program get more systems under management and make progress in those solutions it is at a reduced rate because there is a tax if you will around having to maintain these systems around having to do these upgrades having to monitor them having to do security patches etc etc I'm sure many of you on the call are understand exactly what I mean by all of that if you compare that to a multi-tenant SaaS solution which is that purple line freeing the team up not to have to deal with that effectively moving that to the vendors responsibility allows the customer teams to really focus on what they should be doing in the first place which is building out a more rich and a more robust identity security program this means adding more features adding more systems under management doing more certifications building a better role model getting to what we all try to do is getting to that least privileged state and that's really the benefit of choosing the right multi-tenant SaaS vendor and really making this change and that's really what our customers that are on this journey that have moved from our on-premise solution to our SaaS solution are really starting to see and it's exciting you know we've done a lot of case studies and we have some of these on our website if you're curious and certainly at some of our conferences we've had customers speak about just the rapid success they've had with SaaS and about the continuous success they've had in their program I think for too long in the identity market we've seen customers that make a little bit of progress in phase one or phase two and then stall out because the burden of that blue line suddenly becomes too much and they just their teams can't do anymore and that's honestly the most exciting thing about the the SaaS coming into the identity market and and being able to take advantage of that is that we see customers being able to make continuous progress and really getting to that ultimate vision of identity security which is hey across the enterprise we should have every system under management we should be able to say what employees have access to what what non-employees have access to what and be able to apply roles policy and security on top of those identities to really get to that least privilege model.

The other thing that multi-tenant SaaS solutions provide is enhanced security. What does this mean? This means that again we free up customer teams not to have to really worry about changes in the security market.

I'm sure again everyone on this call is probably well aware that there seems like every day there are new exploits and security issues coming out and along with that new patches from various vendors and the time to value to remediate that can be large right the best example this is one that happened not too long ago I'm sure most of you are familiar with this that log4j exploit for Apache log4j it was a very very common library that was used across many many different applications.

SailPoint by the way was not was a customer that used that both in our on-premise model and our on-premise system and our SaaS products.

Our on-premise customers we were a good vendor we released a patch the same day this came out we posted it to our website our customer success team told all of our customers about that and then it was their responsibility to go and deploy that which is fine and they did that successfully with thankfully a fairly easy security issue to remediate but that obviously takes time and effort and sometimes you know customers can have long change control cycles or you have to divert resources from other projects to go and work on that and some of our customers took some you know weeks to get that fixed.

If you compare and contrast that to our SaaS platform that got fixed on the back end it came out immediately after the vulnerability was announced we announced to our customers that said hey this is remediated just so you know you don't have to do anything and so being able to rely on a central security team that is constantly monitoring the system that is focused on no downtime that's focused on on keeping our customers safe and secure is a really really big benefit for a multi-tenant SaaS solution and if you think earlier kind of back to the you know maybe cloud hosted or hybrid or maybe a single tenant cloud hosted offering all of those all of those solutions have that problem I just described in all that scenario you're in that kind of upgrade world and when things like this come out important changes need to be pushed quickly being able to go through that upgrade cycle can be cumbersome and difficult and so really when you get to the kind of multi-tenant SaaS solutions is when you get out of the business of having to worry about that the other thing I'll mention mention here is just the benefit of multi-tenancy and having a SaaS vendor that can really that is really focused on this one of the great things to look for as you're considering a solution is you know is there are you there's every customer on one version and why does that matter that matters because when things like this come up or changes need to be made having a central team that updates one version of a software allows that team to be very nimble it allows them to find problems quickly if there are security issues they can identify those and track those down compare and contrast that to customers that are vendors that may have thousands of different versions or thousands of hosted platforms trying to find security and that is almost like a needle in a haystack trying to remediate those security issues is non-trivial and can take massive amounts of time so choosing a partner that can that puts security first and foremost and they can respond quickly to security incidents is just a really important aspect as you're thinking about which way to go with your identity program the other thing I'll mention is deployment time if you think about the legacy of identity that I mentioned earlier despite my youthful looks I've been doing this for 23 years we used to think in the identity market and the solutions that were in the market were you know very very much kind of toolkits right a platform to build upon and that worked well when identity was something that was more worried about efficiency we would spend a lot of time writing java or writing perl scripts or writing c code to basically create customizations to on-premise toolkits and that would work for a while and then key people would leave the organization or the upgrade would come and the upgrade would be difficult or take lots of money and time and we just learned that there has to be a better way we can't rely on computer scientists or maybe masters of computer science to be sitting on the keyboard writing custom code configuring really difficult solutions and we thought there has to be a better way to do this and so this is kind of the trend for multi-tenant SaaS solutions in the identity market and certainly something we've embraced at sale point is this idea of let's make things really easy to configure let's be able to model complex business processes without the need to write custom code without the need to write really difficult workflows and and it's systems like that or that allows you to basically take advantage of out-of-the-box configurations this means those deployments go faster you don't have to spend as much on professional services dollars you don't have to spend as much maintaining it and again it's one of the key reasons that that SaaS solutions and cloud solutions are really freeing up identity teams to work on the things that matter as opposed to maintaining tens of thousands of lines of custom code.

I will mention one other point here and this is a question we often get which is but wait I'm really special my business is really different than everyone else's I need these really custom processes and that can be a real thing there are some businesses that require really deep customization and whatnot and I think you know what we're learning is that there's a bell curve right and what we see is the vast majority of customers can fit inside the SaaS platform given at least at sale point the flexibility we have along with kind of the ethos of being able to model these complex processes really is a must for any I think real identity security product and so what we're seeing is that the vast majority of those really can fit inside of a SaaS deployment one thing to look for is you're choosing a vendor or thinking about which way you're headed is you want to think about some of those customizations and see if there are you know can you have a custom workflow can you create a custom connector can you call out to an event trigger system if you need to pull data in at places maybe that the vendor didn't plan for there's a lot of trends in the market to be able to do kind of fast web or fast cloud web-based programming and looking for a vendor that's embraced some of that because the idea is you know you will have some things that that may be outside the box and you need to find a way to model those that scales and that is easy to maintain and that it's not just hunt out and write a bunch of custom code and then you're kind of back where you started so that's a key component and something that's key to look at and I think a good sign of the market and where we're going which is being able to model those complex processes again without massive amounts of configuration.

One of the other key points I think that customers in this market are seeing and benefits of customers that have moved to SaaS is basically being able to get new releases on demand and I think this is a really good litmus test to figure out if you've chosen the right product and if you're in the right place.

The idea of upgrading to the cloud and being able to to make those trade-offs and move things out of your data center and lose a little bit of control over that kind of falls apart if you still have to upgrade the software all the time and especially if you're relying on your vendor to upgrade that software you know if they're promising to do that you know once a year or so or you know how is that going to work is it going to be smooth are you going to have outages it can just get really dang really painful.

Same thing if you decide to stay on an on-premise system now obviously probably speaking preaching to the choir here a little bit but I'm sure people on this call are familiar with that upgrade process which can take some time and effort and cost some money to do.

One of the benefits of going to a true multi-tenant SaaS solution and certainly the one of the benefits that we've seen at sale point come through in a big way is this idea of every customer on the same version constantly getting new features customers being able to take advantage of those features as soon as they're ready never having to upgrade again never having to deal with upgrade outages or painful upgrades changing functionality because the new version doesn't support it.

Again choosing the right SaaS vendor who's embraces that you know that no no upgrades and always staying on the right version is really important and again I think the a key cornerstone to the value proposition. The graph I showed earlier about being able to deploy new features and freeing up your team if you're having to upgrade multiple times a year even if the vendor promises they'll do it for you it's going to make that much much harder to realize and it's going to feel a lot more like a legacy solution than it is like a modern multi-tenant solution.

The other thing is cost of ownership and this is one of the great things it really is kind of fun and one of the things I really enjoyed getting to see the SaaS transformation happen at sale point and for our customers is we effectively have built a better solution that's cheaper which is just really a fun place to be and why is that right why why do customers see a lower overall cost of ownership with with SaaS?

Well one it's probably obvious right you don't have to maintain hardware anymore you know those servers those databases the firewalls the infrastructure you had in place before to run an on-premise solution is something that sale point or a multi-tenant SaaS vendor the cost for us to bear and the beautiful thing about that again especially if you're choosing a vendor who has one version that those costs get amortized over the entire install base so it's just easier to operate and it means that it's cheaper for sale point and cheaper for you all to to use.

The other idea is maintenance right gone are perpetual licenses gone are those version upgrades gone are having to upgrade your database or your application server to or java or whatever to keep track of those systems again that maintenance is becomes the vendor's responsibility and again if it's multi-tenant that gets spared across the entire install base so those cost savings get passed on to end customers.

And then finally personnel we already talked about this a little bit some customers when they move to SaaS it frees up people to either build the program better as I mentioned you know get to that find that elusive least privileged model build out your role model add more systems under management some customers also decide that they're you know going to assign personnel to do other things in the business that may be more pressing at that time so freeing up people to work on more impactful things in the business that doing that infrastructure maintenance and the and the hardware and software maintenance can be really impactful for businesses and then obviously that kind of if you think about bringing that upgrade model along if I've got a if I need to upgrade once a year if I don't have to do the regression testing well now I've just freed up more either dollars or people's time to spend on maybe more important things.

So those are kind of the benefits and I think some of the things to think about as you're thinking about you know is upgrading to the cloud the right thing for for me or if you're dealing with a digital transformation mandate for the broader business I thought I'd also spend a little time just to show you what this looks like inside of SailPoint.

So I mentioned earlier I lead a team of people that help our customers navigate this transition both kind of pre-transition and post so we're taking really happy on-prem customers and turning them into really happy SaaS customers but I thought I'd show some some learnings and just explain how this works here because one of the questions we get a lot is oh okay this sounds great I'd love to be in the cloud but what is it going to take to get from from here to there and how much time and effort do I need to put in. So here's how this works at SailPoint.

We do this in about four weeks for our customers. We start with kind of understanding about the business about their business their business and about their program what's important today. We call this kind of the business review step but it's basically a way just to take a fresh look at the identity program.

Many of our customers have mature programs many of you probably do as well but most likely you know this is a program that's grown over time and the business has changed as I mentioned earlier and so taking a first look at that and understanding what's important today what are the big drivers why are we having this conversation what are the goals to move to cloud what are the changes that need to happen the business is really the cornerstone of what we work with customers on.

From there we want to make sure customers understand what they're buying right so we do a demonstration of the product we do something really interesting here as well you know if you were a customer off the street and came and asked for a demo of our SaaS products we would be more than happy to do that and certainly can explain it but for our customers that are on-prem and our customers that already understand the sale point model that already understand how things work we do a really nice kind of compare and contrast and explain you know what we do when it comes to security how the architecture works what we do when it comes for operations what their responsibilities are in the future so really doing a nice kind of compare and contrast of the way things work today and how things can work in the future that way customers really understand what it means to upgrade to the cloud and a lot of what I walked through with you in this presentation are the things we're explaining in that program to our customers.

From there we really dive into what they have deployed in their on-premise solution and again you know this model works for our DemiIQ customers but for other customers as well we can look at what's deployed in maybe an Oracle system or a legacy IBM system or a legacy Savian system or things like that understanding what's there is really important and it allows us to really be able to map out the next step which is that business value assessment.

Once we really understand where customers are going we give them a good idea of what the target is we understand what they're doing we can really look at that total cost of ownership and understand exactly what the benefits of moving to the SaaS solutions are what the benefits what total cost of ownership benefits they'll see and really some other benefits as well you know as I mentioned earlier being able to free up teams to work on more important things is really exciting so through this step we kind of really show the art of the possible about how what what how customers can use the the team they have to really achieve even more security even more efficiency be even more compliant in the future.

This all leads into the fifth step which is a solution review and this is really one of the penultimate goals of the program which is showing exactly how things work in the cloud getting a high-level plan as I mentioned earlier some customers who are very complex who have been with us maybe for 15 years maybe two steps or three steps to get to the cloud most customers that we're seeing this can happen in kind of one upgrade motion that takes a few months but this plan really details exactly how functionality maps in the cloud how any customizations can either either happen out of the box in the sale point solutions or any configurations that we would need to do to address those business requirements and then really get that high-level plan and then finally all this gets wrapped up in a nice executive readout that is that is designed to be presented to the broader business that can explain what we've learned right this is a good customer to migrate it's going to take four months we're going it's going to look like this when it's complete we're in two years we'll see this great business return on this investment you know this is kind of the learnings and all of this is done in kind of a customer advocacy program you know this is not a sales effort necessarily this is really just trying to help our customers answer those questions that they're often getting from the broader business of you know is it time to think about moving to the cloud so this is how this works at sale point really where as we just try to explain to our to our on-prem customers again what it takes to to if they want to make that transition to the cloud so what are we seeing some really exciting things right again you know on average it's it's four months or so for customers to make this upgrade to the cloud from our on-premise solutions and they're seeing you know a pretty significant reduction in total positive ownership that kind of 10 to 30 percent on average and the great thing is they're getting to take advantage of all of the things i talked about this morning you know obviously our customers are choosing to upgrade to the sale point identity security cloud get the advantages of that multi-tenant solution right they're getting a solution that can manage all of their identities that's easy to maintain that has ai insights and they can help them build that least privileged model that performs that scales that we maintain and that really most importantly is this identity platform that's api first that lives in the cloud that's easy to integrate with the rest of their business i thought i'd just give you one example so this is a u.s manufacturing company with about 4 000 identities that we recently just went through the program you can kind of see you know what they're seeing from a tco and this is just one i pulled out recently you know the the pink line there on the bottom are their sas cost over five years and the blue line is the on-prem cost that are projected over the next five years you can see at about 20 months they cross and the customer really starts saving some significant money on the sas solution and you can see on the right the the bar charts that that really detail exactly how those costs break down between the different systems again this is pretty typical for customers you know often what we're learning as they go through the program is there's a little bit of a migration cost initially to as we move those configurations into the cloud one of the nice things about sale point by the way is we have some tools that make that easier because we own the on-prem side and the sas side we can move things like connectors and roles and rules and identities and correlations and configurations over automatically which helps but even for customers that are coming to us from other systems it's not that hard to move those configurations over often the hard work has already been done and so really just reconfiguring that and the sas side is usually fairly straightforward and then obviously as we talked about this morning being able to get out of the business of having to upgrade of having to maintain the infrastructure of having to to basically do the wear and tear on the team allows customers to really free up those resources to go work on things that may be more impactful so just a couple of key key takeaways before we move into the q a section you know one of the things i think that's important on multi-tenant sas and certainly something you should be looking for you know moving to the cloud and to a multi-tenant sas solution means that getting out of that infrastructure not having to manage security programs operation programs having to upgrade databases and app servers etc really allows you to free up resources to work on more important things hopefully those more important things are a more robust identity program but we're seeing customers use those freed up resources all kinds of interesting ways um the second thing is you know solutions that in the cloud or sas solutions like sailpoint allow you to instantly get those newest features and functionality and to be able to put those to use i didn't really talk a lot about that in the presentation this morning but that's certainly key one of the challenges of having to wait for an upgrade is that um you know there may be a new functionality that's great but if you're 12 months away from doing that upgrade and taking advantage of it and then a couple of months after that of having to configure it with a lot of professional services dollars or cost or difficult customizations you know that kind of is a functionality you never get to use right that sits on the shelf one of the benefits of multi-tenant sas and customers being on the same version is you get to instantly take advantage of those features and functionality and that's certainly something we hear from customers that they really appreciate and then finally getting out of the upgrade game i think overall customers are very excited about this as they move to sas we often talk about through the through the migration program that i'm leading you know the upgrade to sas is really the last upgrade customers ever have to do you know once they get on that multi-tenant sas program they now suddenly are there forever right and they don't have to deal with upgrades again we take advantage we take care of that and they're freed up to work on better things finally i'll leave you with this if if i piqued your interest if you want to learn more we have a micro site on salepoint.com that you can find that is our migration hub we have a lot of case studies there there's some really interesting information there's a white paper that we put out that we really dove into more details on what it means to upgrade the sas some of those benefits etc there's some videos and an ebook so lots of really good resources on the sale point page if you want to learn more about what our customers are seeing as they upgrade to the cloud or just some best practices and tips and tricks so i'd invite you to check that out thank you very much and with that i'm going to pass the mic back and i think we're going to start the q a session perfect thank you so much chris so let's begin with the old results that we have um i can see the first question which we ask is like how is identity security applied in your organization and 41 percent said cloud 32 percent said on-premise uh 23 percent said hybrid and five percent said none so what what are your thoughts on these results so cloud seems to be majority of the solution but on-premise is also not too far behind yet yeah no that's i think that's interesting right and i think that's certainly aligned with what we're seeing right you know cloud is a very very big trend in the market a lot of the things we're seeing from our install base is that they do have these digital transformation efforts there's a lot of pressure to get things migrated from the on-premise data centers out into some version of cloud um so i think that's that's interesting and also you know it's also shows i think another trend we see in the market is that sometimes identity solutions can be complex and have their tentacles in lots of different places so you know deciding you know the right path to upgrade it makes sense so that kind of large number of hybrid and non-premise customers probably isn't very surprising either perfect and the next question that we had asked is what would be the driving factor for moving to cloud and the options we had with digital transformation improved security lower cost or all of the above and 57 percent have answered all of the above while lower cost being 33 percent so i think everyone agrees with the points that we made today so do you have any other things to add in this um i love the all of the above i think that's really great to see oh it's interesting when we first started identity now and like i said almost 10 years ago um one of the big reluctances in the market was security and i think we heard a lot of customers say i'm not so sure about putting my identity data in the cloud you know my crm data for salesforce or you know my ticket information with snow maybe good enough but i'm not sure about identity and it's nice to see that i think mostly that reluctance is gone in the market right i think customers realize that you know the cloud can be a very secure place to store things and certainly the you know level of effort that uh that companies like sale point take to to maintain identity data that's the compliance aspects the security teams the focus of that feels like um you know that's uh that's largely an objection that's gone and the idea that it's 57 all the above doesn't surprise me at all right i think we're seeing those tensions being pulled or being pushed on our our customers right of hey we we need to lower our costs we need to move to the cloud like you know do this now is is a common thing where you hear it's helpful right perfect so that thing wraps our poll results then we can jump into the q&a session um i already have the first question here um so the question is they're asking is when upgrading from on-premise to cloud can i migrate any existing setting and policies or do i have to start from scratch so what have you approached observed in your upgrade assessment program so can you maybe give us some thoughts absolutely um so i'd say two things here so i think um you know if you look at you know the program that we have at sale point in particular and customers that are migrating from our on-premise solutions i mentioned in the presentation there are some tools that allow us to move things like roles and policies connectors and applications up to the cloud um that's a nice benefit we have because the um again we understand the on-premise side very well obviously and our sas product shares some of the same constructs um for if we're migrating customers that are coming from maybe a legacy solution um obviously they're the kind of one-to-one migration doesn't exist however um often the hard part of the work is done in an identity program and the hard part usually is figuring out you know what how should this work right what are what should those policies be if you think about um often when customers are starting on their separation of duty journey they know they want to do this and a question we'll ask a lot is well if you define the policies if the answer is no well then that's usually the first step is to go and figure out okay what are these toxic combinations how do i do that but if those are defined in an existing solution and are already well known it's not that hard to be able to configure those in a new solution so in that case there may not be an automatic one-to-one port but being able to articulate yep these are our toxic combinations let's configure those in the cloud is relatively straightforward and then as i mentioned right going with a cloud solution that doesn't require that can do configurations and not customizations with a lot of professional services means that configuring that is often just in the ui being able to define a policy or a role or a rule with the existing tools and so doing the work is fairly straightforward and then obviously the benefits of doing it in the ui mean that you don't necessarily have to spend a lot of time debugging and troubleshooting and testing because the system's effectively guiding you through that process perfect thank you so much yeah we already have a second question it's so they're asking can i just have my on-prem to be cloud hosted this way i can keep my customization and be in the cloud um that's certainly an option um and i think we see some customers opting for that especially customers that have digital transformation efforts where their cso says hey we need to be out of the data center yesterday right um unfortunately lifting and shifting an existing on-premise solution into a cloud technology is often more expensive and you're still left with some of the challenges of maintaining complex customizations having to do upgrades on a regular basis and then now you have a little bit of a burden where your team now has to be aware of the database technology that's in the cloud you know the connectivity with the cloud and how that works you've added a bit of a another layer of complexity on top of it so it does solve some problems it may be able to check the box to your cso that says yep we're out of the data center we're good um but often that comes with some tax of being more expensive and then also um you know maybe a little harder to maintain than it was in the past so i think what we're what we see at sale point is that that can be maybe a stepping stone an interim solution as customers get ready to make you know a journey to to to a multi-tenant system perfect thanks and we have one more question what are some of the common mistakes that you saw organizations make while migrating to cloud so i think one of the most common mistakes and i talked about in our assessment program right that kind of first step where we're taking a wider look at the business and really understanding what what does the business look like today one of the nice things about upgrading to to identity now at sale point is it gives customers a chance to kind of take a fresh look at their program and not just assume that the existing solution they have is defining every requirement they have right so being able to take stock of where the business is to really understand what's working well in their program what isn't and then being able to chart a course towards uh towards a new solution is really an important step down that path um you know often it's interesting we'll get in and we'll you know start looking at at um at existing legacy systems and we'll understand you know why does it work this way you know can you explain you know what's happening here and often what we hear from customers is either they don't know or you know while they were coding around some deficiency in some ancient identity system and so really understanding kind of hey what does the business need from this and then being able to go back to the business with a best practice answer you know this is the way this works um we've done this for a long time at sale point and being able to say you know this is the way 99 of customers do uh an approval process or a certification process we need to do it the same way can really free up um uh businesses to not kind of paint themselves into a highly custom corner and really can make the system much much easier to maintain we have the question here um with the current iiq on brand option to do configurations customizations is good can we address the business cases like integrating with apache kafka as sot when we move to cloud how much these features such as custom connectors quick we get when we end up in the cloud that's a great question um so you know specifically on identity iq if you think about things like connectors so one of the nice advantages of the way we did this at sale point is the connectivity framework is the same between the on-premise system and our cloud system so things like custom connectors even existing custom connectors can just port over from the existing identity iq solutions um which is a really nice advantage and i mentioned this earlier although i didn't really go deep that idea of you know just moving to the cloud if you move to a cloud solution that is you know light right that can barely do anything you're going to lose a lot of functionality and one of the benefits of at least the sale point approach is we really started off with the idea of hey we knew we wanted to be multi-tenant we knew we wanted to make something easier for customers to maintain but we were aware that we had to be able to model complex business processes you know sale point grew up in the enterprise space we deal with some of the largest companies on the planet when it comes to their identity needs so having that flexibility to be able to model those processes is really key to um to our identity strategy in the cloud so things like integration with kafka things like um quick links and being able to kick off custom processes are things that are just kind of table stakes for us and so you know there there are some bounds you know identity security cloud is not um you're not going to write a lot of java you're not going to be able to create your own web pages and things like that that you may be able to do on identity iq but the idea of hey i want to gather some information and kick off workflow is absolutely something that we can support thanks chris um so i don't see any more questions coming our way um so thank you so much for your so uh for everyone attending thank you for uh attending um we do have some slides for you as well such as this one uh we are having a eice event in berlin this year from may 9 to may 12 and the key topics that will be covered range from securing identities decentralized identity and many more so i hope to see many of you there and looking forward next is we also have many related research around this topic so please head to our website and you will find more content on this topic of cloud security and as keeping our goal we also provide multiple services so such as advisory research and the webinar and events so please check out our website for more content and thank you everyone thanks chris it was pleasure to host the webinar with you and hope to see you again again soon yeah thank you all i really appreciate uh hosting the webinar with you as well and thanks everybody for attending thank you bye