SailPoint Partnership

Cambridge recently partnered with SailPoint. Cambridge has long been a leader in providing Identity and Access Management services and has maintained partnerships with NetIQ, Oracle and Microsoft for years. We give the highest importance to providing quality services to our clients, using the vendor products we’re partnered with. Therefore, the decision to start a partnership with a new vendor is taken very seriously and involves strategic planning and analysis. This ensures that the vendor is able to provide our clients a high standard of quality.

In case of SailPoint, starting a partnership was an easy decision – they have a leading product in the Access Governance market. Established in 2005, this company has taken a completely fresh approach to Identity Management – through Access Governance. This is the reason why it has managed to set itself apart from the rest so quickly, as it has moved the focus of traditional Identity Management from an IT solution to a Business solution.

Oracle, NetIQ and Microsoft all have strong provisioning engines and provide a comprehensive set of functionalities. However, in all three cases, the Access Governance functionality is missing from their Identity Manager products. Oracle provides this by way of Oracle Identity Analytics while NetIQ is a reseller of SailPoint IdentityIQ. In either case, it is necessary to integrate additional products into the existing environment to get similar functionality. SailPoint IdentityIQ, on the other hand, offers one single product that is able to provide Governance and Provisioning from one single interface.

What sets SailPoint further apart from its competitors, is the intuitive user interface it provides while providing a rich set of features and functionality. From the very little hard disk space and memory it needs, to the ease of installation and patching, it is able to provide powerful results with minimal effort. Therefore, whether it is a large client with millions of identities (their largest client has over 1.7 million) to a small company with less than a 1000 users, the effort and costs associated with the implementation are low.

SailPoint’s recommended strategy while considering any kind of Identity and Access Management project is to start with a business user driven Identity Lifecycle Control, built on a model & policy based approach. That is, understand the current state and clean the data first, before moving on to any kind of provisioning functionality. To support this approach, it provides a Risk Based Model. This Risk-based Model can be used to assign a risk score to all roles and entitlements. Therefore, users with a high risk score can be flagged and their entitlements can be reviewed. If after review, it is discovered that some of the entitlements are not needed by the users, they can be removed, bringing down the user’s risk score. This functionality helps define a strong foundation for any Identity Management solution – clean data leads to easier management of users, easier certification process, and easier maintenance & proof of compliance. Traditionally, Identity Management projects have been, to a certain degree, focused on provisioning while not giving appropriate importance to the data cleansing process. In some implementations, this ends up leading to a state of Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Whether you are completely new to this field and looking for a place to start or already have a centralized provisioning system in place and are looking for a way to integrate Access Governance, SailPoint’s approach helps make this process easier. The technical team responsible for the creation of IBM Tivoli and Sun Identity Manager also created SailPoint IdentityIQ. Therefore their product has been built by experienced people, keeping in mind the issues and challenges faced in the previous generations of Identity Management products.

In summary, they’ve built a single product that solves most requirements around Identity Management and Access Governance. It has been designed with a business user in mind, provides flexible provisioning services as well as a dynamic risk model that allows companies to get compliant, stay compliant and prove compliance. Given all the above-mentioned features, Cambridge has rightly partnered with SailPoint - our team will be happy to help you assess if SailPoint is right for you!