In collaboration with the largest cloud providers including salesforce.com, Cisco and Google, leading identity management providers Ping Identity, SailPoint, Technology Nexus and UnboundID Corp. today announced the formal interoperability testing for a candidate specification for the Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) interface standard. The specification is the culmination of development between industry leaders in the SCIM working group. The interoperability demonstration is scheduled to take place at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in Mountain View, California on October 18 - 20, 2011.
With growing adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud applications, many enterprises and service providers are struggling with how to onboard users rapidly, accurately, and consistently. To address this need, the SCIM interface standard is being developed to create a uniform identity management interface for SaaS and cloud applications. Its intent is to reduce the cost and complexity of managing users in and out of SaaS applications by eliminating the need for separate and proprietary interfaces to each individual application. The cross-industry team designed this specification candidate with an emphasis on simplicity, while supporting existing authentication, authorization, and privacy models.
"Major cloud service providers"¦have found that they need to become more agile when configuring customer access to these services. The ability to provision user accounts rapidly, accurately, and in standardized fashion helps both service providers and their enterprise customers to achieve productive, access-controlled service usage faster. To meet this goal, these service providers, along with vendors "¦have collaboratively developed the new draft protocol called Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM)," according to the Forrester Research, Inc. report, Understanding Simple Cloud Identity Management, July 15, 2011.
During the IIW event, participating SCIM supporters will demonstrate interoperability scenarios between vendors and hold discussions to validate the direction and approach of the specification. Participants also plan to hold an open forum during the IIW event to discuss moving the SCIM specification to a formal standards development organization for adoption.
Supporting Quotes:
"As the number of cloud applications in the enterprise increases, so does the need to ensure secure access to these applications. This underscores the importance for a provisioning standard that all cloud vendors can implement," said Patrick Harding, CTO of Ping Identity. "We are excited to help drive this industry commitment to standards and the vendor collaboration needed to ensure that the cloud identity infrastructure laid down today will enable secure and efficient user administration tomorrow."
"Providing this candidate specification for SCIM is an exciting milestone in the identity management world," said Darran Rolls, CTO of SailPoint. "It´s imperative that we as IdM vendors work to speed and simplify how enterprises integrate their identity infrastructure with SaaS applications. As evidenced by the early support we´ve gotten from the major cloud application vendors, industry adoption of SCIM is quickly becoming a reality."
"With SCIM, we are well on our way to establishing trusted identity data to and in the cloud, a foundational requirement for enterprises wanting to take full advantages of possibilities that cloud computing offers. As interoperability is key to prove the value of an open system, the SCIM interop will open up the value of SCIM to an even broader audience," says Per Hägerö, CTO of Technology Nexus.
"By easing the flow of identity information between the cloud and the enterprise, SCIM solves one of the hardest problems faced by both cloud service providers and enterprises today as adoption for cloud-based services increases," said Andy Land, VP of Marketing, UnboundID. "Demonstrating SCIM interoperability is exciting progress in moving away from proprietary protocols toward a truly simple, deployable cloud identity management standard."
About SailPoint
SailPoint, a leader in identity management, helps the world´s largest organizations to mitigate risk, reduce IT costs and ensure compliance. The company´s award-winning software, SailPoint IdentityIQ TM, provides superior visibility into and control over user access to sensitive applications and data while streamlining the access request and delivery process. As the industry´s first business-oriented identity governance suite, IdentityIQ quickly delivers tangible results with risk-aware compliance management, closed-loop user lifecycle management, flexible provisioning, an integrated governance model, and identity intelligence. Visit www.sailpoint.com to learn more.
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