Fischer is well suited for the use case scenarios where an institution has not previously used any identity management and needs to quickly provide services to meet regulatory or other deadlines. It also works well when you can implement in smaller batches of user accounts and grow over time. We have found it less appropriate for cases where we have needed to set up on-off temporary or special access. Fischer has worked with us on out-of-band provisioning but we had to pay for extra Fischer professional services to make that work.
SAP Identity Management manages organization identities centrally with a great amount of flexibility and efficiency. Compared to the conventional SAP solution of central user administration (CUA), SAP IDM (version 7.2/8.0) delivers a great number of benefits like: 1. Availability of connectors for non-SAP application identity management,
2. Modular/granular access management in the form of context-based business role definition.
3. It can be integrated with the SAP HR system for making entire user identity management automatic.
In my previous organization, to achieve the granularity of access based on organization restrictions, we implemented enabler role-based security roles. Provisioning the enabler roles through the SAP GRC was a great challenge (realistically improbable). Here came the SAP IDM to our rescue. It has a peculiar feature of context-based business role provisioning feature.
Customized context & its association with security roles & user HR attributes, give us unique ability to achieve granularity of access provisioning.
SAP IDM integrates with the SAP HR system and identity management becomes automatic.
Reducing the frequency (twice a month) of scheduled outages. But I believe they are making progress toward developing a more robust cloud infrastructure that will eliminate the need for such frequent downtimes.
There are some less than intuitive administration tools, which could be improved. Fisher is always willing to help us when we don't understand the proper way to configure using the tools.
I would like a streamlined way to move changes from our test environment into our production (live) environment instead of having to duplicate the effort.
SAP Identity management should come up with connectors for almost all not SAP applications, which will enable the use of SAP IDM as a one-stop solution for organizations' identity management.
As IDM heavily relies on JAVA/SQL as a development language, finding skills resources sometimes becomes challenging. But SAP has strong support available for this product which makes it reliable for long term use within an organization.
It does deliver as advertised, provided you do your homework and understand the expected outcome before going live. Poor planning can turn the project into a nightmare. It can save the company a good deal of man hours and money by bringing about identity management automation, a self-service portal, and customizable email notifications for all of the identity owners and other stakeholders. For example, you can inform your HR team upon successful account creation and disablement. You can proactively reach out to users informing them about their account extirpation status, etc.
SAP IDM offers a great deal of benefits/features compared to conventional access provisioning with SAP.
1. Conventional SAP user administration solution like CUA has great limitations. e.g. only SAP systems can be managed. Low-performance issues, unreliable access provisioning, and risk analysis were missing.
2. SAP IDM integrates with SAP GRC solution to perform the reliable risk analysis before access provisioning. Its context feature allows granular access provisioning.
Fischer has had a positive impact by providing self-serve identity and password management tools that our constituents can use at their convience, not tied to our operational hours.
Fisher Identity as a Service has been a significant cost, but it is anticipated that it saves our students significant time and effort that they can better dedicate to their academic pursuits.
Negative initial reaction--as this was a new way of doing things, there was a period of confusion among our college constituent that required additional communication and instruction
SAP IDM has the huge potential to minimize risks arising out of disorganized identity management within an organization. As all identities are managed centrally, there is very little room for manipulation of an identity.
As this solution has the ability to integrate with SAP GRC, risk analysis becomes mandatory before any access provisioning takes place.
As the solution is automatic, hiring to employee exits is managed with a minimal margin of error.
