1 Introduction
EmpowerID was founded in 2005 and is based out of Dublin, Ohio. EmpowerID takes a unified approach to Identity and Access Management. EmpowerID offers User Management, Provisioning, Access Governance, Privilege Management, Single Sign-On (SSO), access management and identity federation in one product. EmpowerID is workflow-based, highly configurable and customizable, while paying attention to the current issues in Identity & Access Management, such as Cloud services, consumer focused IAM, and the need for high scalability.
Workflow is extremely useful for organizations that need to customize IAM functions but do not want to write and maintain lots of custom code. EmpowerID ships with more than 750 ready-to-use workflows with significant coverage from user provisioning, entitlement management, SaaS integration, access reconciliation, and identity federation. The workflow engine in EmpowerID allows an organization to implement virtually any business process in a consistent way without requiring a large number of resources.
It should however be noted that for provisioning, while EmpowerID has deep functionality with AD, there are a fair number of platforms to which it can also provision out-of-the-box. EmpowerID offers full AD support, mailbox provisioning and provisioning to other Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) compliant directories. While EmpowerID supports connectivity to major systems such as AD, LDAP etc. with native connectors, they also provide connectors to a variety of non-LDAP systems, such as NoSQL databases. Provisioning via SCIM is also possible with EmpowerID. EmpowerID can even provision and manage identities for Amazon AWS VMs.
With the Microsoft centric background, EmpowerID presents a credible approach to the otherwise seemingly cumbersome task of managing large SharePoint sites by adding inventory and access request workflows for SharePoint sites and Group as well as SharePoint user profile synchronization.
EmpowerID has hundreds of enterprise and government customers around the world, including in Europe, North America, and Australia. The product is fully multi-tenant, and some installations support high volume transactions with users numbering in the tens of millions. Industries served include healthcare, education, finance, defense, and state/local governments. For now, most customers run EmpowerID locally on Windows Servers, with IIS and SQL backends. The EmpowerID suite can run in Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Some customers use EmpowerID as an IDaaS solution, and more options for cloud deployment are planned in the near future, including an offering as a Managed Security Service Provider.
EmpowerID directly provides implementation and system integration support for North American clients. In the EU, they partner with Avanade and other system integrators for installation and configuration support.
