Evolution from IDaaS to the SaaS-Delivered IAM

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As enterprises rapidly evolve their overall cloud-first strategy, they are also rethinking their identity and access management (IAM) deployment models. The question on everyone’s mind is how to transition from on-premises IAM, which they invested in so heavily over many years, to the cloud and still maintain full functionality.

Many organizations embarked on the journey to cloud with a hybrid cloud approach. Often, they deployed their legacy on-premises IAM solutions in their own private clouds and just leveraged the public cloud as another data center. This gave them more flexibility to scale on demand and provided the agility to meet the business needs of dynamic and ever-changing workloads without the need to invest heavily in their infrastructures.

Others chose managed services, outsourcing identity management to a third party that has the expertise and staff to run and maintain on-premises identity solutions. IAM managed services was a viable alternative for organizations that were challenged to hire, train, and retain professionals with the skills required to manage and support IAM operations.

And some were early adopters of pure-play identity as a service (IDaaS) solutions – a term whose meaning has evolved over the past few years. In the past, Gartner published a dedicated magic quadrant for IDaaS and defined it as, “a predominantly cloud-based service in a multi-tenant or dedicated and hosted delivery model that brokers core identity governance and administration (IGA), access, and intelligence functions to target systems on customers' premises and in the cloud.”

The problem with these solutions, even back then, has been their limited capabilities. But the good news is that they are evolving quickly and are becoming more feature-rich and robust. With that evolution, Gartner has changed the name of the category as well to SaaS-delivered Identity and Access Management (SaaS-delivered IAM).

Why are people transitioning to SaaS-delivered IAM?

This is primarily driven by the increasing demand for more comprehensive cloud IAM capabilities from customers who want to consume more and more IAM functionality as a cloud service.

Market projections show that the IDaaS market is expected to grow from USD $2.5 billion in 2019 to USD $6.5 billion by 2024, a compound annual growth rate of 21.1%.1

We here at ForgeRock offer a comprehensive IAM platform, whether you choose our software version to deploy it in your own data centers, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or public cloud or you choose to consume it as a service provided by us. This is the foundation of the ForgeRock “your cloud, their cloud, or our cloud” strategy. The goal here is to provide you all of the features and functionality that meets your enterprise needs, however you decide to consume it.

ForgeRock Identity Cloud

Identity Cloud is the comprehensive ForgeRock Identity Platform delivered as a cloud service. It enables you to reduce operational risk by consuming the IAM service from a trusted vendor and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by offloading the infrastructure and maintenance of the platform. This allows you to focus your energy on developing business IP, not creating and running IDAM solutions or infrastructure.

Even if you’re thinking about moving to the cloud but are not quite ready for it, you can still take advantage of ForgeRock’s complete suite of modern capabilities that address any identity need, in any environment.


Read more about the ForgeRock Identity Platform and the ForgeRock Identity Cloud or contact us to get your specific questions answered.