SailPoint IdentityIQ Reviews

We use SailPoint IdentityIQ for identity and life cycle management management for devices. It helps us with access certification, password management, and other essential functionalities.

SailPoint IdentityIQ has a good and straightforward user interface. They also have a lot of resources and documentation available to understand the process.

The product’s cloud offering could be flexible.

We have been using SailPoint IdentityIQ for six to seven months.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

We have large-scale institutes as our customers for SailPoint IdentityIQ. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support team responds within an acceptable time frame and is knowledgeable.

Neutral

I used Oracle for a three-year-long project. I encountered constant challenges with incompatibility, or bugs and glitches using it.

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten. It takes a couple of days to complete.

The product is expensive. I rate its pricing an eight out of ten.

I rate SailPoint IdentityIQ an eight out of ten. I recommend it to others as it is used widely and has a knowledge base. I advise organizations to streamline their processes rather than to customize the products.

We use SailPoint IdentityIQ for identity governance and access management. There is no other vendor as good as this product. 

I find the built-in connectors, lifecycle management, certification, and recertification features to be the most valuable.

Access management could be improved. SailPoint is known for its IT identity governance capabilities, but its access management features in one platform.

Comparing SailPoint's access management to that of competitors like CyberArk and Okta, there's a clear gap.

Additionally, regarding privilege access management, there's potential for improvement. If SailPoint can develop a connector for RPAQ, they could also extend their capabilities by adding more access management features and modules.

I have been using it for three years. I am currently using version 8.3.

We actually have a lot of challenges with some of our applications. Some of them are not working properly, and the issues are not fixed. We are encountering some problems.

Scalability is hard, especially when you are doing it in real time. But, it would be eliminated once we have the first version of IdentityNow. So, the main goal for now is just to eliminate maintenance costs or run the entire infrastructure. That's why we plan to migrate it to the SaaS version of SailPoint.

We have more than 10,000 end users. We use it daily, 24/7 operation.

Initially, I had difficulties, but with time, I gained experience. Especially integrating legacy applications like ARPAQ. Over time, it became easier, but integrating legacy apps remains a typical issue.

In terms of user experience, I don't have any complaints.  We are planning to migrate to the cloud.

We did it in-house with the help of a third-party vendor experienced in deploying SailPoint.

The deployment took a couple of weeks in a test environment before going into production.

We require maybe around four people because, in our company, we have different roles and responsibilities. So, from another perspective, from the system administrator, we require around four resources.

It is affordable licensing. 

Currently, we are looking for another option, which is EmpowerID.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. If you want to start, go better directly to the cloud, instead of installing it on-prem.

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.

I'm working on the implementation. I have encountered various use cases for the solution. Among the most common are clients using life cycle management, role-based access control, policy evaluation, and risk scores. Clients have widely utilized password reset functionality. Recently, contractor onboarding directly from IdentityIQ has emerged as a use case.

Additionally, clients have used the platform for access management tasks such as requesting new access, adding or removing accesses, and creating accounts. Furthermore, integrations with ServiceNow have become viable.

The most powerful feature of the solution is its platform-based approach. Unlike other solutions, this tool offers a high level of customization. It is an open and flexible platform, allowing users to tailor it to their needs. This ability to customize and adapt the solution to individual requirements makes the solution stand out as a powerful product.

There is a need for further enhancements, specifically in the multifactor authentication capabilities.

I have been using the solution for the past five years. I’m using the most recent version.

The solution is highly stable.

The solution is scalable and super flexible. I have 50,000 users for the product. I rate it a ten out of ten.

There has been a return on investment.

The success of the implementation depends on customers knowing exactly what is needed from the solution. Assuming that the consultant or the product will handle everything is not the right approach. The customers should know what they need. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution predominantly for the leaver process. 

This solution is easy to configure. 

The mover process for this solution could be improved. 

We have used this solution for six months. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. This took one week. 

We have a monthly subscription for this solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The third party is the non-payroll staff of the University. IdentityNow is used to manage services.

We are happy with the SailPoint IdentityIQ’s stability.

SailPoint IdentityIQ could be cheaper.

I have been using SailPoint IdentityIQ for a few years.

SailPoint IdentityIQ is a scalable solution. We onboarded about 30,000 students, 7,000 staff, and 7,000 third parties that we need to manage on the platform. They use it themselves, and we just need to manage the numbers on the platform. People are managing it administratively within IT with five to six people.

We have engaged with SailPoint IdentityIQ's technical support and faced no problems with them.

The solution’s initial setup is complex.

We implemented SailPoint IdentityIQ through a consultant. The solution’s deployment takes around seven months.

We have seen a return on investment with SailPoint IdentityIQ because it manages our risks.

We pay an annual licensing cost for SailPoint IdentityIQ.

SailPoint IdentityIQ is deployed on-cloud in our organization. SailPoint IdentityIQ covers our whole portfolio, and its growth will depend on the growth of our numbers.

I would advise other users to be very sure of what they want to achieve and select the right product instead of being brand specific. In our case, SailPoint IdentityIQ matched the capabilities we sought.

Overall, I rate SailPoint IdentityIQ a seven out of ten.

SailPoint IdentityIQ is for identity and access management.

What I like most about SailPoint IdentityIQ is that it's simple to use and easy to configure and deploy.

The pricing for SailPoint IdentityIQ has room for improvement because it's more expensive than other products in the market. If there's a price reduction, that would be helpful.

Another area for improvement in the product is the technical support, which needs to be more friendly to customers.

I want custom form building and custom workflow features added to SailPoint IdentityIQ in its next release.

I started using SailPoint IdentityIQ in 2015, so I have almost eight years of experience with it.

SailPoint IdentityIQ is a very stable product.

SailPoint IdentityIQ is a scalable product.

The SailPoint IdentityIQ technical support can be a bit irritating when doing system inspections. When you have an issue and ask for help, support will tell you that you need professional support, not just regular support.

The technical support team could be more friendly.

I'd give SailPoint IdentityIQ support a three on a scale of one to five.

I've tried Saviynt but compared to SailPoint IdentityIQ, Saviynt isn't stable. It also has fewer features compared to what you get from SailPoint IdentityIQ. For me, SailPoint IdentityIQ is better because of its stability, and it offers many features. However, cost-wise, Saviynt is cheaper.

SailPoint IdentityIQ has a straightforward setup. I'd rate its setup a five out of five.

SailPoint is expensive compared to its competitors. It's one of the most expensive products, so I'd rate it as one out of five, cost-wise.

I'm using SailPoint IdentityIQ, SailPoint IdentityNow, and Auth0.

My rating for SailPoint IdentityIQ is eight out of ten.

My company is a SailPoint partner.

We primarily use this solution to manage our identity. We use it for identity access and onboarding accounts and users.

Previously, when someone came on board, it took them almost a week or two to get access, to settle in, to be able to become productive. Now, with SailPoint, we can get all of that done within a few hours. It has decreased the onboarding process and increased productivity.

So far, we are still in the implementation phase, but one feature that is so valuable is the life cycle management of identity. We also like the integration with other systems. Is very robust and solid. They built some plugins that are really well thought out and they handle most of our requirements. We also like the user interface of the product.

The service could be improved with some more out-of-the-box features. If the solution could make the forms more customizable, for example. They are very generic and any changes you make to them, you are doing customization. The solution needs more templates that meet general needs.

I would like to see more Cloud management from this product. Right now they have some, but they are currently plug-ins. It does not handle the management of some of the groups or dynamic groups in the Cloud. I would like to see that in the future. I have heard that they are releasing one soon, but I'm not sure when. That will help us a lot because we are a hybrid solution company. We have some on-prem, some in the Cloud, and we want to manage both.

I've been using the solution for one and a half years.

When we were doing the request for proposal, we did evaluate stability and got some references from other big enterprise companies that use the product. So we knew, before we selected, we knew that they had a solid product. We've heard that from many of the references we received. But when they came and did the presentation for us, they impressed us. They knew the product, they listened to what we needed, what our pain points were, and they were able to answer our questions and provide us with answers to some of our use cases. We had our requirements and they were pretty much the only one from the other vendors that we selected that could meet ninety percent of all requirements. The rest, they were limited. They had some, or they were struggling on one feature, but not others. But SailPoint, they were strong in most of them.

In terms of scalability, they can handle it. That was one of our requirements is how they could scale. We asked what number of accounts they can handle, and they were way beyond those. Some of their previous implementation, some of the companies they implemented for, they were four times the size of our company. So we were aware that this solution could handle our growth.

I would say we have about eighteen thousand users. 

Right now we are using the solution for onboarding user accounts. Primary and secondary accounts. Our second phase will be managing groups and applications, access to new groups and applications. Then the third, we'll go a little bit with analytics with doing some risk-scoring. Beyond that, we might even use it for any new innovation or company comes with, in terms of managing access to devices and IOTs.

So far the integrators have been doing the support. I wish the support from SailPoint was a little bit faster than we've experienced so far. It has taken, sometimes, a couple of weeks to get feedback from them. At the same time, support played a big role in selecting the product.

Previously, we picked a product that got moved between so many companies and got bought and merged, so the support was really horrible. We had bad support back then.

The initial setup was straightforward. We knew our requirements, and we've got all the infrastructure required for the system. We didn't have a lot of issues with the product itself. There were some vulnerabilities in the product, but they addressed them in the next version. They were able to address them in version 7.3.

Our deployment took us about, I would say a week. We had to do it in different phases. 

The implementation strategy we had was to start with first, deploying development and QA systems. Then gather lessons learned from these systems, then go to production. That helped us a lot because we found out that we have a lot of concerns with our infrastructure. There were a lot of firewalls that we had to open to communicate with the external system, with the Cloud system that we needed to connect to. So, a lot of that was more like ad-hoc testing. Because we weren't sure how many of the firewall ports we needed to open and which ones we needed. That took a lot of our time. It was just the infrastructure from our end. In terms of the installation of the product and the implementation of it, that was very quick.

We have a big staff because we are integrating with so many other systems from HR to Active Directory to SAP. So the core team is about twelve to twenty people, but the extended team, I would say, if you combine them all together with all the work we've done, is probably more than thirty or forty. They are not all technical. Some of them were just there for governance or requirement gathering.

We use an integrator to do all the coding for us, and that worked very well. They knew the product. They've implemented for a while for other clients. The company we work with is called Edgile and we have had a great experience working with them. We work very well with them. We consider them our partners. They understand our requirements, and they give us their feedback and their best practices. So we have a good relationship.

In terms of our phase one, to get people onboarded right away, within a day, that has saved us a lot of money. Also, the product discovered a lot of clean-up that we needed to do in the kind of systems that we integrate. Previously, we didn't know. So that helped us a lot in cleaning up some of our data. 

There are so many other features and other things that we can do probably, that we haven't gotten to that we know is going to save a lot in terms of the password reset support. Right now, our outsource company handles that. Once we start implementing that in a few more weeks, people will have self-service password resets. They don't need to call the help desk to get it unlocked. It costs us money, using the help desk. They will be able to do it themselves and it will save us money.

Group management and access to the application will help us too. Right now, that's all done through ticket requests and manual access implementation. In our next phase, that's all going to be automated where do you go to a form and select that and you get access, get approved and get access. It will save us a lot of time from the support respect.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis. That's not my part of the job, so I don't know what the costs are. I handle Bio Supply management so I really don't know.

There are add-ons. A lot of them have to do with if we want any plug-in's. So if there's any new system that comes to our company that we want to integrate with, they sell their plug-ins as an add-on. It's not out-of-the-box. So integration with Active Directory, that was an add-on. Integration with SAP, that was an add-on. They are their own module. They are not packaged with the product that comes with it. You have to buy them separately. But, everybody needs them.

We had our previous vendor submit in our RFP, but they did not bring anything to the table that was new. There weren't many enhancements and improvements to the product and we really did not have a good experience with their support. 

We were looking at One Identity. SAPIEN was another one we looked at. Also, Okta, NetIQ, and Centrify. But, some of them were mainly cloud-based. Some of them were a mix of both, but more of cloud and less of on-prem. So, SailPoint was the right one that handled both.

We had some use cases that we gave to them and we needed them to answer how they would implement that use case. We wanted that feedback out of all of the vendors. SailPoint was the only one that came back with the right answers.

We have some old processes in place that need to be revisited and updated. Those, of course, made our implementation a little bit late and we ran into some issues.

One of the hurdles has been that people are used to the old method and when a new change comes in, a lot of people are not very open-minded to it. So it takes a lot of training and convincing about this new technology. We need to make changes to the way the form looks, the process. We had to make a lot of changes to the current processes. We had very outdated processes that were not working well for us because we had to get a lot of exceptions. And any exceptions you make, you tend to break automation and start doing manual processes, and that slows down productivity. 

That was a little bit frustrating and a lesson learned. Feedback from the client and explaining to them why we're changing some of the processes, policies, and standards was challenging. But we had to do a lot of cleanup before doing the implementation. We had an old system that was there for more than seven years. So that product was almost at the end of its life and we had a lot of complaints from the client that they were fed up with it. They wanted a change. But they were not expecting a change to the forms and the processes. They were expecting us to just solve the issues and move on, not a big system change. So we're training people. We created a lot of videos for them to play back when they request things. That helped a lot. We created a blog for them to give us any of their feedback. So we can make improvements because we are still in phase two of our implementation. We still have three more phases to go.

For advice, I would say to make sure you gather your requirements first. Make sure you have more thoughts, make sure you know what your pain points are and what are you expecting to get out of the product that you select. That will help you a lot in selecting the right vendors. Secondly, have some solid use cases, and when you use those use cases, most of the time you should know the answer to the questions. That will help you in identifying who can meet your requirements.

Do your diligence in terms of getting some references. Specifically, references for a current implementation from another customer. Getting that information from that customer will help you a lot in terms of how their implementation went, and what their pain points were in implementation.

I would give the solution a nine out of ten. When every possible manual process we have right now can get automated, I'll give it a ten. We still have some processes that we have to do manually.