Microsoft Entra External ID vs. SAP Identity Management

It is not easy to calculate the actual ROI due to the difficult quantification of all factors, but it certainly contributed a lot in protecting, monitoring and controlling access to our system. It also made it much easier to detect vulnerable external users with simple and "easy to hack" passwords they use on multiple apps.

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.

Incentivized

• Single sign-on simplifies access to your apps from anywhere
• Strong authentication for your customers using their preferred identity provider.
• Integrating with social accounts such as Facebook or Google+

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Troubleshooting diagnostic logs effectively requires VS Code
• Group and role management requires additional effort
• The programming model (XML) could use some developer experience love

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Each one of these alternatives has pros and cons. PingOne from Ping Identity states they "help deliver the secure and seamless customer experience to win battles for customer acquisition, retention, revenue, loyalty, and trust." While that may be the case, they did not fit our needs. We have a complex system and it did not seem to fit into our business.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Having monthly active users billing was cost-effective.
• Helped with the IT support that was already managing the Azure platform of the company; this helped to manage the costs better and optimize them.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized