SailPoint Identity Security Cloud Reviews

Security and administration for any new/current access.

Manage process and search information.

It improves the function for CMS - the website is a centralized system to manage accounts and access for CMS applications.

It allowed to implement the automated processes when a new employee is hired. It allows to have a main central process for new hires.

I've used it for three years now.

No, but we encountered some bugs after the implementation and they were fixed.

A few of them - they were connection and performance issues but they both have been fixed.

Yes. We needed to contact Sailpoint directly to address the issue.

It was ok.

It needs to improve SLA.

The client made the decision.

Both vendor team and in-house.

I wasn't involved in the process, but other solutions were evaluated before choosing this one.

Verify the requirements and the growth.

User provisioning and the role management features are good.

The advanced provisioning features require more improvement.

I have used this solution for seven years.

I would rate the technical support a 4/5.

The setup was straightforward.

I did evaluate other options.

I would recommend this product based on the customer requirements.

• Provisioning in multiple environments
• Certification
• Provisioning Auditing

Automated accounts provisioning during the on-boarding process.

Additional details during account aggregation failures to help quick troubleshooting.

We started with our customer last fall.

No issues encountered.

None.

Initial testing with a large amount of cubes (over 60K) went well.

Good.

Good - via a forum (Compass) and ticketing system.

SailPoin

Yes, we used Sun Identity Management and we switched because Sun IDM is coming to the end of its life.

It was straightforward as we have a lot of experience with Sun IDM.

I am part of a consulting service team who can provide Identity Management platform implementation. We have been helping our customer implement Sun IDM in the past and last fall, we helped the customer in SailPoint.

Oracle Identity Manager was the other one we helped evaluate.

Understand the customer's business practice regarding provisioning.

Access Governance has become and integral part of cyber security. It is essential to keep track of who has what access. Sailpoint IIQ simplifies this by providing an OOTB module for access certification. Administrators can create, schedule and design certification with just a few clicks.

A lot of OOTB connectors for managing various types of applications. Simplified process for application on boarding and provisioning.

Simplified Access Governance and Life Cycle Management. Easy to implement in comparison to other IAM tools.

Should have authentication modules as well

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the stability.

There were no issues with scaling it for our needs.

The initial setup is straightforward. Easy installation and configuration.

Implement Sailpoint IIQ for Access Governance and for simplified Identity Management.

• Certification
• Full Life Cycle management of IT system accounts

• It has, for the first time, consolidated a single view of a user's access to the company's multiple IT systems
• This has now allowed us to confidently cleanup a large proportion of accounts that could not previously have been easily identified as no longer required
• Furthermore, it has forced ownership of non-user/non-individual accounts and accountability of them

• Reporting and some GUI aspects. Reporting lacks the flexibility of retrieving the vast amount of data that we know is in the database, but not easily accessible
• Scheduling also comes short, specifically when it comes to multiple jobs that are interdependent (e.g. preventing certain groups of jobs from running concurrently)

Five years across different companies.

Yes - Some application connectors (namely Lotus Notes) - have some fundamental flaws. But the major issue was cleaning up, what we expected to be, authoritative data - specifically HR data, and users not in HR (eg. contractors, etc) and ensuring global consistency and adherence to standards.

Not of the core product, but some issues with some of the connectors (especially Lotus Notes, and ServiceNow). This has led to some issues with daily batch jobs which either time out, hang, or are terminated and this has in turn, we suspect, created some internal DB link corruptions.

Not yet. Though current nightly batch jobs range from completing within 8 hours to 48 hours, with no obvious reasons as to why

Very good.

Very good.

Yes we did. We switched because the solution no longer offered support as it was sold to Sailpoint.

It was complex. Identity and account management is very heavily dependent on the accuracy, authority, and timing of the source data. As the implementation progressed, we became aware more and more that some of the missing detail (especially around the exceptions of when a central unique Employee number is actually "central" or consistent, or the complexity of some of the attributes - e.g. whether their validity is date dependent, allowing for multiple values, etc) will cause issues in the proposed processes and the timing of providing access when required.

We used a vendor whose level of expertise was excellent.

No ROI as of yet.

It was two years give or take.

Yes - NetIQ, Oracle, and SAP.

Spend double the time/money up front in fully understanding your business requirements, opportunities for process changes. Also ensure you get a detailed understanding of identity and access business processes and understand your HR (and other authoritative) data source.

• Access risk alerts
• Access Certification
• Self-Service Access Request
• Password Management

• Development framework
• Workflows configuration

Two years.

No issues encountered.

No, the platform has been stable.

Yes, I found some scalability issues:

• Java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
• Advanced searchs with 0 rows

7/10.

8/10.

Yes. In several customers we have switched to SailPoint IdentityIQ due to the unified architecture and intuitive centralized governance across datacenter.

The initial setup always was straightforward with shorter implementation times and quick benefits.

We haven`t calculate the ROI. Mainly, cost savings are associated to:

• Identifying unused or unauthorized accounts and reports them back to the appropriate business sponsor for removal and potential cost savings
• Reduce the cost of compliance by automating access review processes

In several cases, the IdentityIQ deployment was due to a migration from other IAM solution (Oracle Identity Manager). Usually, before deploying an IAM solution, we do a benchmark test with the customer to get the best solution for their requirements.

• Phased Deployment
• Get to know new features
• Expand gracefully/logically
• Create a change control & env. management process
• Automate where possible
• Become flexible with migrations

User Access Review, User Access Request and SOD Policy detection. Another important feature is IdentityIQ’s provisioning broker which allows us to either use its built-in provisioning engine or easily integrate with third-party provisioning and help desk/ticketing systems (such as IBM TIM/SIM, Oracle IdM, BMC IDM, BMC Service Desk, Novell IdM, Microsoft Forefront IdM, ServiceNow etc.) The backend provisioning of IdentityIQ is lightweight and fast to implement. Generally account provisioning can be setup in days versus weeks as is the case with some of the competing products.

SailPoint’s roots began with governance and compliance in 2006. Over time the IdentityIQ compliance and governance stack (user access reviews, SOD and access request) has evolved to provide deeper and more flexible functionality than we’ve found with competitors.

We’ve used IdentityIQ to help customers update their ‘paper and spreadsheet’ based user access review processes. This has helped customers increase the efficiency of access reviews, reduce workload, increase oversight of access remediation as well as start to fulfill regulatory and audit compliance requirements that where previously unattainable.

We’ve seen organisations go from detecting and reviewing high-severity SOD Policy violations once or twice a year to being able to detect and remediate SOD violations in the same day. IdentityIQ provides the detection, enforcement and traceability to take the manual, paper-based policies into real automated rules.

Many of our customers have also used IdentityIQ to replace homegrown and out dated access request solutions (some even manual and paper based), as well as migrate away from expensive and difficult-to-implement provisioning systems. Implementing IdentityIQ has allowed customers to reduce the cost of on-boarding applications into enterprise access review and access request processes as well as tightly integrate access request and remediation with approval workflows and back-end provisioning.

Unlike other competing products IdentityIQ is designed with end-users in mind rather than just targeting the IAM system administrators, we would like to have a bit more flexibility in how the screens are laid-out and the content. Some of our clients prefer feature-rich UI/screens whilst other would like to have simpler interaction and presentation.

Dashboards – whilst better and more feature rich than a number of competing products, they are still nowhere near the functionality one gets from dedicated portal and analytics tools (eg. drill-downs, comparative views, etc.).

Report writing is much better in the latest versions, but it is still not comparable to what one can get out of dedicated reporting tools.

I started working with IdentityIQ in 2007. Until now, I’ve been actively involved in design and configuration of a large number of IdentityIQ deployments across Australia, Asia, America and the Middle East. We (First Point Global) have been a SailPoint partner since 2007.

In terms of the product itself - no. Deployment of the product is very straightforward; there are a lot of resources available to assist you in finding the answer to any deployment question you might come up with. There is a large community of people working on IdentityIQ. If you come across a problem there’s always someone around that’s done that before and has suggestions.

The main challenge has been that each client’s environment is different; from the way in which they configure their ‘managed’ systems, to constraints imposed by the client’s SOE (standard operating environment), to the client’s infrastructure topology, to change control and migration processes and tools the client wants to/has to use.

One of the main challenges is for clients to understand and accept that IdentityIQ implementations are not a systems development/coding exercise; rather IdentityIQ deployment is more about configuration than coding.

No, IdentityIQ is stable. It has easy, built-in redundancy to handle any unforeseen events. Also, server management is simple and easy to understand.

IdentityIQ scales well both vertically (‘bigger’ servers) and horizontally. When load increases additional servers can be added to the UI or task server groups with minimal configuration effort. IdentityIQ supports the notion of having dedicated UI servers handling user interaction and task servers, which handle background activities (eg. data loading and refresh, generating reports, re-evaluating SOD policies, etc.). IdentityIQ manages its own batch server load balancing in the background. SailPoint also provide whitepapers and supporting materials on tuning your IdentityIQ deployment to meet your needs and your environment.

However, we have encountered issues using IdentityIQ on virtualized platforms. These were caused by the virtualization hosts being overloaded (i.e. several virtual machines on one overloaded host). If you are going to virtualise IdentityIQ application servers, I would recommend allocating vCPU and memory to each virtual machine. If resources are not allocated, IdentityIQ can be starved by other virtual machines running on the same hosts.

Great, SailPoint offers several points of contact. You can use either the SailPoint communities, customer portal (Salesforce-based) for management of support cases and queries, or directly contact your professional services manger or engagement manager. SailPoint has staff located in most geographies and it’s easy to get hold of someone technical when you need a hand.

Excellent, SailPoint provides both customer and partner community forums; SailPoint technical staff, partners and customers actively contribute to these forums. Often you can find the answer to a question in a forum without the need to raise a support ticket. The communities are an invaluable repository of technical knowhow as well as a source for documentation, tutorials and videos. SailPoint also holds regular webinars. These and all whitepapers are stored and made available to the community. By using the community, it’s possible to find out who has done it before, see what solutions they came up with, as well as even contact that person to ask questions. It’s a great way to get to the bottom of something quickly.

SailPoint support engineers are located in most geographies so your questions get answered quickly. The SEs are also approachable and easy to work with.

As a company we implement identity solutions for customers. We’ve implemented a variety of product replacements and migrations, including:

Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) replacement (formally Sun Role Manager and Vaau RBAC), OIA lacked the flexibility and functionality to meet the customers’ SOD (Segregation of Duty) Policy requirements as well as entitlement and role modeling requirements. Lack of industry resources with implementation product knowledge was also a factor in retiring OIA solutions; lack of supported application connectors (and/or complexity, eg. requiring fully functional implementation of Oracle IdM for OIA to function) was another factor.

BMC IDM / Control-SA, we’ve implemented both Control SA replacement, and more recently we worked on Control SA end-of-life migration projects. SailPoint offers a clear migration strategy to replace existing Control SA/ESS deployments. SailPoint acquired the BMCs IDM/Control-SA Connector stack people/technology to make migration much simpler exercise; replacing Control SA/ESS can be as simple as configuring the application connectors in IdentityIQ and pointing them to the existing Control SA Agents or Service Manager. Since acquiring the BMC ESS Connector stack, SailPoint has started rewriting the connectors into agentless Java connectors which are simpler to use. Some legacy connections still require agents i.e. RACF, ACF2, NIS.

Prior to compliance and governance solutions coming to the forefront of identity management, we found our customers were starting to think about and “roll their own” solutions to complement the gaps in their IdM stacks; this often involved attempting to ‘bolt on’ access reviews and SOD functionality into existing provisioning systems.We’ve worked with customers to replace several in-house developed solutions, including customer-developed Access Request, User Access Review and even a custom developed Provisioning system! In each case the customer chose to migrate off their home-rolled solution to take advantage of the savings offered from an out-of-the-box solution as well as take advance of the deep compliance and provisioning functionality that IdentityIQ offers.

Installation requires knowledge of application servers and relational databases; a high availability environment can be setup in a matter of hours-days once infrastructure is in place. IdentityIQ requires a relational database and supports all the main flavors, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, MySQL; IdentityIQ runs on a Java application server, again the common platforms are supported, Oracle, IBM, Apache Tomcat and Red Hat JBoss.

We (First Point Global) are a solutions integrator specialising in identity management; a typical project implementation team involves First Point Global consultants with years of experience in deploying IdentityIQ into large organisations. We work with and train the customer team to up-skill employees to assist in transfer of the IdentityIQ solution from implementation to BAU.

Of course you will always rate yourself as high, but we are the largest team of IdentityIQ implementers in APAC. Also, we won the SailPoint Amarda Award in both 2013 and 2014 for SailPoint’s top partner in the Asia Pacific region.

Through our implementations we’ve seen the existing manual access review processes shrink from a team of people used to gather, send and review certification results down to one or two administrators. Gathering of account data, sending of access review notifications, escalation of incomplete access reviews and detection of remediation is all automated. Administrators can focus on reviewing the results not doing the heavy lifting, results can be easily summarised for the people that need it.

IdentityIQ is still a relatively new comer to identity management, but its implementation is modern and it has built on the lessons learnt from the older, harder to use and often cryptically complex provisioning systems. Workflows and connections to applications do not need to be complex and take far less time to implement than heavy provisioning systems.

IdentityIQ is quicker to implement than its pure provisioning counterparts, implementing IdentityIQ for compliance and governance means you can later reuse the existing on-boarded application connections to implement provisioning.

The cost associated with setup depends on the scope of work, and largely the extent of integration with the applications to be on boarded as well as the functionality applied to those applications (i.e. access review, access request, provisioning, roles, SOD, etc.).

IdentityIQ is a very flexible product. We’ve found the key to using it well and getting the best value for money is to determine how to model your access review, access request or provisioning processes in IdentityIQ, then apply that to a majority of applications. If applications require unique processes for each department, there can be additional configuration overhead, aim for economies of scale where possible.

Some examples of projects:

-30 day IdentityIQ ‘quickstart’ project, on-boarding of 7 high-risk enterprise applications + HR feeds. User access reviews configured and kicked-off in production.

-90 day Control SA migration project, migration of hundreds of provisioned applications into IdentityIQ. And replacement of Control SA Password Management and Access Request functionality with IdentityIQ

-100-200 days IdentityIQ governance project, on-boarding of all enterprise applications into IdentityIQ to perform regular access reviews and detect SOD violations as they occur.

For day to day running of IdentityIQ post implementation we generally advise a small administration team of 2-3 people; some of our clients are supporting IdentityIQ deployment with a 0.5 FTE. Administrators are responsible for performing general house keeping as well as fielding queries on access reviews and scheduling access reviews, new application on-boarding and patching.

We’ve reviewed Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) and RSA as well as the Dell offerings. Of the three we found RSA Aveska the closest competitor to SailPoint; the Oracle and Dell offerings do not have the same depth of functionality. When doing feature-by-feature comparison as is in a typical RFP/RFQ the majority of IdM products look the same. There are two areas where IdentityIQ often proved to be better than competing products were ‘time to market’ (i.e. how long it takes and how much effort is required to start addressing real issues and delivering value to the business) and complex user access review scenarios.

Listen to the vendor and other clients who have successfully implemented the product; lots of, problems with hardware and implementation process can be avoided by taking the advice of those who have been there before.

Ensure the project has strong leadership. You’ll need this to ensure cooperation of system administrators that are often protective of access to their applications. You need to configure provisioning, but administrators will only give you a read-only account until it is proven it works and will not cause problems. Or enterprise architects may insist that all integration has to be done through corporate middleware, requiring lots of custom development, rather than using OTB connectors.

Make sure your hardware meets the SailPoint requirements (see the ‘IdentityIQ Performance Optimization Checklist’ on SailPoint’s forum - this details the required hardware and network requirements at a glance). IdentityIQ supports virtualisation nicely, but you do need to make sure your virtualisation hosts have enough resources to meet IdentityIQ processing requirements. We suggest allocating CPUs and memory to IdentityIQ application hosts to ensure dedicated usage of required resources.

Make sure your database and application servers have a low latency round trip. We recommend putting the two in the same data centre. IdentityIQ is a big user of data - lower the time it takes to retrieve the data and the UI and batch tasks perform snappier.

Install your development environment to get started with IdentityIQ, then read the ‘IdentityIQ Performance Management Guide’ to ensure that all non-development environments are installed and tuned correctly for your infrastructure. A tuned environment is a fast environment; and fast environment means happy end-user. Also, make sure your administrators do regular health checks.

Deploying IdentityIQ is an integration task, use agile development to on-board applications quickly, have a simple to document application template to capture integration details, but remember you are not designing a system from the ground up. This is not a Java/VB/C++/you-name-it coding exercise.

Using OOTB means fast implementation times and lower cost to you. IdentityIQ is flexible but customizing everything will add to your costs now and your maintenance later. Keep it simple and keep the process standardised.

How often do you need to refresh the data? The hardware required to run IdentityIQ is largely dependent on how often you configure IdentityIQ to reload the data. How often the data is really required to be reloaded is largely dependent on the features you are using,. For example, SOD policy violation detect might require daily updates, but reviewing user access quarterly does not require daily data refreshing!

If you do want to keep all data up to date, then be smart and take advantage of IdentityIQ’s delta aggregation and partitioning functionality. Build application on-boarding tuning into your application on-boarding process and have database administrators review queries for performance.

Always utilise the direct connectors. Although IdentityIQ supports a variety of file feed connectors using the direct connectors now means you can take advantage of provisioning later without reconfiguring. Remember file feeds are unlikely to match the data the direct connector will pull back, reuse the investment SailPoint have made in the OOTB connectors and save time and money!

Standardise the compliance processes applied to applications. IdentityIQ is flexible but a unique access review process for each application will require more configuration and maintenance. Keep it simple and easy to maintain.

IdentityIQ has been the market leader according to the Gartner IGA Magic Quadrant for the past two years. We deploy and support several identity and access management products, and have reviewed numerous other vendors’ offerings.On balance we find IdentityIQ to have the best mix of functionality and ease of use, as well as being the easiest and most flexible to deploy.Quite a few of our engineers prefer to use and deploy IdentityIQ over other compliance, governance and provisioning solutions.

Certification of user's access, enabling the organization to have a strict governance of what its employees are for entitled to currently.

By using this product the organization has moved from manual access governance done previously to automated governance which has a full audit trail, and this is very beneficial.

Some of the features like multi-aggregation and self healing feature in case of corrupted certificates would be pretty useful which would enable easy debugging in case of issues.

More than two years.

No, the deployment is pretty straightforward.

No, the product is pretty stable given it has sufficient clustering and HA catered for seamless 24x7 high volume access.

Yes, with a growing number of certificates there was slowness in the overall certificate generation time which I believe is corrected in the upcoming release of the solution.

7/10.

8/10.

Yes, we used Aveksa's access governance which seemed to have a lot of issues with regards to aggregation and certificate generation which prompted the switch to Sailpoint.

It was pretty straightforward, just need to follow installation documentation properly.

It was done by the in-house team.

Aveksa was compared with Sailpoint identityIQ and Sailpoint IdentityIQ fared better in terms of performance and features.

If you are looking for a product that would suit your access governance needs then perhaps Sailpoint identity IQ is a good option, but if you require automatic remediation capabilities as well then you might need to integrate it with an identity management product like OIM.