Identity as a Service (IDaaS) - IGA

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) with a focus on Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) describes a fast-growing IAM market driven by cloud delivery of traditionally on-premises capabilities. Organizations adopt IDaaS to accelerate time-to-value, extend governance and controls to expanding SaaS portfolios, align with global IAM standards, reduce internal IAM costs and delivery failures, and modernize operations. The market has converged Access Management (SSO, federation, authentication/authorization) with Identity Administration (lifecycle, provisioning, repositories, connectors) and—less consistently—Access Governance (reviews, analytics, SoD).

IDaaS vendors come from different origins (access management, IGA, or SSO), which explains uneven capability depth, especially in hybrid environments. Hybrid support remains a central challenge: connecting back to legacy web apps and on-prem systems is often harder than with on-prem solutions, and access governance in the cloud can be limited by architecture, ownership, and integration constraints. Adoption is also inhibited by data residency concerns, reliance on provider security controls, and difficulty supporting highly customized internal processes, though there is a trend toward moving even complex governance use cases to IDaaS.

The document distinguishes IDaaS Access Management (traditional SSO/WAM vendors modernizing for cloud, and cloud-born AM vendors struggling with on-prem AM) from IDaaS IGA (vendors strong in provisioning/governance but often weaker in advanced AM). Evaluation emphasizes connectors (breadth/depth), configurable workflows without coding, self-service, mobile UX, access requests/reviews/analytics, baseline AM, APIs, hybrid support, and modern microservices/container architecture.

Leadership ratings place Microsoft first overall, followed by Saviynt and IBM, with SailPoint, EmpowerID, and Okta also leaders. Product leadership is led by Saviynt; innovation leadership highlights Saviynt, Microsoft, and EmpowerID; market leadership is dominated by Microsoft, IBM, Micro Focus, Okta, SailPoint, and SAP. Vendor profiles show diverse approaches, from turnkey standardized IGA (SailPoint IdentityNow) to governance/intelligence depth (Saviynt) and suite breadth with strong workflows and SoD (EmpowerID).

• IDaaS is delivered as SaaS hosted and managed by the IDaaS vendor.
• Offerings that use another vendor’s on-premises software to provide hosted and managed IAM services are not considered IDaaS vendors.
• Common IDaaS services are typically priced per managed identity or per active user per month.
• Some functions such as user authentication or fraud detection can be charged per transaction.
• Overall leaders listed are EmpowerID, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, SailPoint, and Saviynt.
• Saviynt leads the Product Leadership rating in this Leadership Compass.
• Innovation leadership is described as a head-to-head competition between Saviynt, Microsoft, and EmpowerID.
• Market leaders listed are IBM, Micro Focus, Microsoft, Okta, SailPoint, and SAP.
• Okta provides out-of-the-box integrations to around 200 systems for identity provisioning, mostly SaaS services.
• iWelcome operates 14 data centers in Europe and 2 each in the US and APAC.

• “Generally speaking, supporting hybrid IT environments is amongst the main challenges for IDaaS, across all areas.”
• “Access governance represents the group of capabilities that are least mature and still frequently absent from the portfolio of IDaaS vendors…”
• “From that perspective, two aspects are of highest relevance: Elasticity of the service and a pay-per-use license model.”
• “Currently, most of the leading solutions have been ported from traditional on premises deployments…”
• “Otherwise, customers have to deal with two separate solutions, adding massive complexity to their environments.”
• “Selecting a vendor of a product or service must not be only based on the comparison provided by a KuppingerCole Leadership Compass.”
• “Innovation is not about delivering a constant flow of new releases.”
• “Microsoft Azure AD currently is a solution that is primarily targeted at supporting SaaS applications, but not that much the hybrid environments of customers.”
• “Okta Lifecycle Management can be an interesting solution for customers, specifically when Access Governance requirements are not high on their list.”
• “We recommend evaluating Saviynt when looking for IGA solutions, regardless of the deployment model…”