1 Introduction
The landscape for Identity and Access Management (IAM) is changing substantially: while large-scale traditional IAM Systems are operated within most enterprises, many strategic changes can be seen in almost any organization. Among these are the advent of mobile and remote access to enterprise resources through a vast range of portable devices including mobile phones, tablets or notebook computers. Also, potentially large numbers of external users (ranging from partners to customers and prospects) need to be incorporated into enterprise processes and infrastructure concepts as well as new concepts for the collaboration of organizations, which can be summarized as what KuppingerCole refers to as the “new ABC ─ the Agile Business, connected”, need to be taken into consideration including the relationship between the employee and the business (B2E), the interaction between customers and the business (B2C), and the relationship between and among businesses (B2B). The continuing rise of the cloud cannot be ignored as it increasingly gains traction as an additional and increasingly important platform for delivering existing as well as new types of IT services (from Infrastructure as a Service to Software and Platforms as a Service) are important components of today’s enterprise IT service delivery strategies and need to be adequately maintained regarding their security, identity administration and governance.
Traditional perimeter-based security, while still needed, is getting less important. Previously adequate strategies for implementing tools and processes for achieving governance and for providing evidence for compliance need to be adapted and extended to meet the above given new challenges.
Many organizations and many vendors have understood that with the changing landscape as described above, the role of identity and its associated access is getting increasingly important. The simplistic, but nevertheless true statement that “identity is the new perimeter” illustrates the importance of the role of adequate Identity Management, powerful and efficient administrative processes and rock-solid governance across all enterprise resources.
Adequate concepts and product offerings require an intelligent approach towards integrating with existing infrastructures, data sources and processes. Customers looking for solutions in the above described areas are not looking for another identity and access management suite. They are rather looking for new solutions and concepts tying together their existing on-premise infrastructure with external cloud service offerings. This, however, has to be achieved at an Internet scale, with the identity and its access to corporate and external resources being at the core of the architectural vision.
While relatively new to the Identity marketplace, One Identity has a long history in technology far exceeding most of its competitors. Its worldwide presence dwarfs most of its competition and includes resellers, VARs and system integrators with a strong knowledge and much experience with the product lines added by one Idenetity through the acquisition of Quest Software.
The identity and access management products from the Quest portfolio, mostly rebranded with the One Identity name, were already considered leaders in their categories at the time One Identity acquired them. This is still true. Many of the products, in fact, were already mature when acquired by Quest in the dozen years before the One Identity acquisition.
One Identity continues to innovate the product lines with the recent release of new modules for data governance and cloud access, as well as a significant number of new features and improvements to their IAM suite.
