One of the most prominent challenges organizations encounter during their journey from the Datacenter to the Public Cloud and SaaS solutions are proper onboarding and offboarding of employees, contractors, interns, and temporary staff. With the impact of Covid-19, many organizations are working through the effects of employee furloughs as well. Still, even in 2020, organizations have manual processes driven by multiple employees, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge. These manual processes are time-consuming and eventually lead to the organization’s identity state that does not match the universe of information workers. This mismatch causes security breaches, compliance failures, licensing issues, and potential legal impacts.
Typical with many organizations that have transitioned workloads outside their datacenter walls to the Public Cloud is the presence of Active Directory as the original identity source of truth. To reach out and establish relationships with SaaS solutions, organizations have looked towards Single Sign-on (SSO) tools such as Microsoft ADFS, Okta, OneLogin, and Azure AD to federate their on-premise identity to these services. Using these SSO tools, organizations realize the positive impact of using best-of-breed SaaS solutions, gaining productivity benefits without the operational burdens of application infrastructure management. What these SaaS solutions do not provide is a cohesive platform for managing employee identity across different services. The same issues with application access in the Datacenter exist in the Public Cloud and SaaS solutions.