Identity as a Service (IDaaS) - IGA

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) with a focus on Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) describes a fast-growing IAM market driven by cloud delivery, quicker time-to-value, and the need to extend governance across expanding SaaS portfolios. IDaaS has evolved from early web-centric use cases to delivering broad IAM capabilities across application delivery models, combining identity administration, access management, and (less mature) access governance as cloud services. While identity administration and access management are widely delivered, access governance remains uneven due to architectural constraints, integration challenges with legacy systems, and organizational preferences for on-premises control and auditing; nevertheless, more complex governance use cases are increasingly shifting to the cloud.

The document emphasizes that hybrid support is a central challenge: reaching back to on-premises resources and legacy applications can be harder than with traditional on-prem deployments, making connector breadth/depth, workflow configurability (without coding), and strong APIs crucial selection criteria. The market includes offerings spanning pure multi-tenant SaaS and managed-service-like models; from the customer perspective, elasticity and pay-per-use matter more than strict multi-tenancy, especially as container and microservices architectures reduce per-tenant overhead and simplify updates.

Evaluation criteria cover functional capabilities (directories, onboarding, connectors, provisioning flows, self-service, access requests, reviews, analytics, SoD, entitlement models), operational resilience, strategy, ecosystem, and architecture maturity. Overall Leaders include EmpowerID, IBM, Microsoft, One Identity, SailPoint, Saviynt, and Simeio (with Ilantus also appearing strongly in product leadership). Correlated matrices highlight “Big Ones” (IBM, Microsoft, SailPoint, Saviynt, Simeio) balancing market strength with product and innovation, while several challengers offer differentiated strengths but lack global scale or ecosystem depth.

• The Leadership Compass evaluates over 40% more IDaaS IGA vendors than in previous years.
• Overall Leaders are EmpowerID, IBM, Microsoft, One Identity, SailPoint, Saviynt, and Simeio.
• Product Leaders are EmpowerID, IBM, Ilantus, Microsoft, One Identity, SailPoint, Saviynt, and Simeio.
• Innovation Leaders are Accenture, Avatier, EmpowerID, IBM, Microsoft, SailPoint, Saviynt, and Simeio.
• Market Leaders are IBM, Microsoft, One Identity, SailPoint, SAP, Saviynt, and Simeio.
• IBM is ahead of Microsoft and SailPoint in the Market Leadership view.
• SailPoint and Saviynt lead the Innovation Leadership segment head-to-head.
• SAP appears as a Market Leader while lacking the product capability level of the “Market Champions” in the Market/Product matrix.
• Access governance is described as the least mature capability group and is still frequently absent from IDaaS vendor portfolios.
• IDaaS offerings are commonly priced per managed identity or active user per month, with some functions charged per transaction.

• “IGA is essential to business as a strategic approach to ensure overall IT security and regulatory compliance.”
• “The level of identity and access intelligence has become a key differentiator between IGA product solutions.”
• “Automation is a key trend in IGA to reduce management workload by automating tasks and providing process workflows.”
• “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 by moving them to container-based deployments.”
• “Innovation is not about delivering a constant flow of new releases.”
• “Vendors below the line have a weaker market position than expected according to their product maturity.”
• “Otherwise, customers have to deal with two separate solutions, adding massive complexity to their environments.”