Top 8 IAM Challenges with your SaaS Apps

The Importance of Identity for SaaS Applications

The enterprise cloud revolution is here. IT organizations everywhere, from small and mid-sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies, are moving from on-premises software to on-demand, cloud-based services. As enterprise IT makes this transition to a new hybrid on-demand/on-premises configuration, controlling who is granted access to which applications becomes increasingly important. This presents CIOs and their teams with a whole new set of identity management challenges. In addition, users must keep track of multiple URLs, user names, and passwords to get access to their applications. IT’s role is also fundamentally changing. As the steward of these new services, IT must provide insight and advice about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products to ensure the company is maximizing the business value of their investments.

There are eight main identity and access management (IAM) challenges associated with adopting and deploying cloud and SaaS applications, as well as best practices for addressing each of them.

1. User Password Fatigue

Although the SaaS model initially makes it easier for users to access their applications, complexity quickly increases with the number of applications. Each application has different password requirements and expiration cycles. The variety of requirements multiplied by the variety of expiration cycles equals diminished user productivity and increased user frustration as they spend time trying to reset, remember, and manage these constantly changing passwords and URLs across all of their applications.

Perhaps of even greater concern are the security risks caused by the same users who react to this “password fatigue” by using obvious or reused passwords written down on Post-it notes or saved in Excel files on laptops.

Cloud-based IAM services can alleviate these concerns by providing single sign-on (SSO) across all of these applications, giving users a central place to access all of their applications with a single user name and password. Better yet, a cloud-based identity management system can also enable various departments to manage identities for bo