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Five Questions You Should Ask Potential IAM Providers

ManageEngine Announces Launch of Privileged Identity Management Suite

SR_Identity_and_Access_Management_Buyers_Guide_Cover_350The following is an excerpt from Solutions Review’s 2015 Identity Management Solutions Buyer’s Guide, to view the whole report, including five questions to ask yourself when looking for an IAM solution, and a full market breakdown of vendors,  download if for free here.

Could you describe your solutions’ ability to support the following authentication types: Password, Soft-token, Hard-token, Bio-metric, Adaptive, Certificate, and Out-of-Band mobile device?

We have included 24 solutions in our Buyers Guide and each brings to the table a different and strongly held view of the best way to deliver Identity and Access Management. Make potential vendors take a stand and defend their model against the other options available.

How does your Identity Management Solution enable or improve web-based Single Sign-On?

The benefits of single sign-on are compelling; reduced password fatigue from different user name and password combinations, less time spent re-entering passwords for the same identity and lower IT costs due to fewer IT help desk calls about passwords.

Explain how Identity Federation does or does not fit into your proposed solution?

The need for partners or contractors to securely access internal business applications is becoming a daily reality for many enterprises. Plus, the need to provide employees with access to external providers systems like outsourced human resources applications has created a genuine demand for Federated Identity Management solutions. If not an immediate requirement, certainly one to consider as your needs grow.

How do you manage access from mobile devices and what operating systems do you support?

If you’re committed to providing employees, vendors, and customers access to systems from anywhere, at any time, then you need to understand what a solution can support with regard to mobile devices. Additionally, if your organization has made a commitment to a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy then you will need to understand whether an IAM solution can support not only iOS, but Android, Windows and Blackberry as well.

How is your solution priced?

At some point, you need to get to the bottom-line. According to Forrester Research, “IAM solution pricing has traditionally been more complex than other middleware pricing.” Certainly there is a wide range of sophistication in the solutions we have selected below, so there will be a spectrum of pricing models. Some will include line items for various options and others will be a simple per user fees. In order to get an apples to apples comparison and build a cost model that you can plan around, you will need to have put each solution into some sort of “per user per month” cost model. So get all the line by line costs and divide by the number of users and then add that to the per-user fees.

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