GigaOm Radar for Identity as a Service (IDaaS)v2.0

1. Summary

Identity management presents a significant challenge to organizations as more complex and distributed environments continue to impact their operational management and UX. Securing the identity of users is crucial for controlling access to resources, and it’s at the heart of cybersecurity efforts because the impact of a credential or identity security breach is potentially catastrophic. Thus, finding a robust identity management approach is essential.

Identity security and management platforms must cover the broad spectrum of identity challenges facing today’s organizations, which include more distributed workforces and infrastructure, complex password management, identity management overhead, and burgeoning security threats. These challenges, together with the complexity of modern infrastructure, have made it difficult to architect, maintain, and operate traditional identity management platforms. This has driven the demand for as-a-service platforms to help address these challenges while eliminating the complexity, cost, and operational overhead that goes with an on-premises environment.

Fortunately, as the issues presented by managing, governing, and securing identity continue to evolve, so has the technology. The identity as a service (IDaaS) market is developing rapidly to help organizations address the complex challenges presented by online identity security. Identity solutions may address these challenges in a number of ways, but fundamentally they will offer:

• A centralized identity platform.
• A range of enhanced identity and authentication security features, such as multifactor authentication.
• The ability to provide single sign-on (SSO) to multiple applications.

Even these basic capabilities can significantly improve an organization’s ability to manage identity. But identity products don’t stop at improving the end-user experience and providing the ability to work and collaborate securely with customers and partners. Leading solutions go far beyond these basic capabilities and use identity as a key part of enhanced threat detection and response. They also help organizations adopt new identity security initiatives, such as passwordless access, and drive identity management and security across clouds and cloud applications.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key IDaaS vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating IDaaS Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.