Evolving Identity and Access Management in the SAP Ecosystem

The German SAP User group, short DSAG, has many areas of expertise and its various Workgroups are entirely managed by volunteers from all over the industries. It has been active almost as long as SAP itself. The Identity Access Management Workgroup is part of the Security & Vulnerability group and was in the past years strongly focused on SAP's IdM tool - it was even named after it. But recently the group's focus became much broader and challenged with an unprecedented event. SAP announcing End-of-Life of its IdM tool for 2027 affects over 1500 customers worldwide. All these customers face the same and enormous task to migrate from one IAM tool to another within the next 3-6 years. SAP did not name a concrete predecessor, but gave only a strong recommendation for Microsoft Entra ID together with SAPs Cloud Identity Services. Thus the customers are not equipped with a clear migration path, but each one needs to find out on its own, which IAM is the customers best fit and then plan and carry out the migration by themselves.

But they are not alone. The DSAG Identity Access Management Workgroup aims at supporting customers on this path and addressing their issues with the SAP and also with Microsoft. We bring together customers from all industries with different maturity levels of IAM implementations. In the past year alone various task forces have been started within the group, spanning from researching known migration experiences with different IAM vendors to deep diving into SAP's and Microsoft's solutions.

Here we want to share the results of these efforts so far, representing a unique accumulation of customer perspectives on this to-remain-vivid topic. Learn also, why SAPs decision, to cut off the product, will provide us a better IAM solution within a bright future!