Introduction to SailPoint

Before we get into understanding ‘SailPoint’ it is necessary to understand what is meant by ‘Identity and Access management’ and where it is used. ‘Identity and Access Management’ is one of the security frameworks which consists of various rules and regulations that, is needed by most organizations today. IAM in a nutshell specifies that correct permissions be given to the correct employees for the various applications of an organization.

An IAM solution will include password management, provisioning software, enforcing security policies and more. IAM solutions will also enable organizations to be compliant with various regulations like HIPAA, GDPR and SOX.  SailPoint’s Identity IQ solution automates the various IT processes and helps organizations to be complaint with various regulations. IAM strategies will be different for small and large organizations.

Consider the case when an organization is small:

The manpower used by smaller organizations will be less and hence, they will use lesser number of applications (mobile, cloud, on-premise) Specifying permissions for the different applications can be done manually and much easily in such a case. In this scenario, a proper IAM solution may or may not be necessary.

However, as an organization grows, manpower increases and the corresponding applications used by them increases too. In order to manage the permissions for the different applications IAM solutions now become an integral part of the organization. Employing an effective IAM solution, increases the productivity of an organization and secures the organization from various security disruptions.

Since “identity” is at the crux of Identity management solutions, SailPoint’ defines the following points as identity’s best practices.

An identity management program should answer the following questions:

1. “ who has access to what resources and data,
2. who actually should have access and
3. how are those access rights enforced” (Identity and Access Management)

SailPoint:

SailPoint’s IdentityIQ is a leading IAM solution for enterprise organizations today. As already stated, it automates several IT processes and is complaint with various regulations. SailPoint’s IdentityIQ has been named as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Identity Governance and Administration for the sixth year in a row (as of October 2019)

By utilizing SailPoint’s IdentityIQ, organizations can manage passwords, respond to user access requests, automatically onboard and off board applications, access certifications and work with other features thereby controlling the business in a much more efficient way.

SailPoint SaaS IAM solution can be integrated with a variety of applications which are present either in the data center or the cloud. These are some of the software that SailPoint can be integrated with:

1. cloud infrastructure such as AWS,
2. applications such as Cerner, Office 365, Salesforce,
3. data such Dropbox, box, SharePoint
4. access management solutions such as Okta, Azure, Active Directory
5. Privileged access management providers such as Computer Associates, Centrify, CyberArk
6. being compliant with regulations such as CCPA, FISMA, GDPR, HIPAA, SOX
7. Regulated industries such as Government, healthcare and higher education.

In addition, SailPoint has a number of components which facilitate password management, automating access certifications and more. These are the key components of SailPoint IdentityIQ:

1. IdentityIQ Compliance manager

The IdentityIQ compliance manager manages the execution of compliance controls for the different businesses and improves audit performance.

2. IdentityIQ Lifecycle manager

IdentityIQ Lifecycle manager automates lifecycle event management of creating, changing and revoking user access privileges based on a user’s life cycle.

3. IdentityIQ Password manager

The IdentityIQ password manager is used to manage the different user passwords.

4. IdentityIQ Governance platform

IdentityIQ Governance platform is the place where all data is centralized. In addition, this is also the place where roles, policies, risk and business processes are modeled.

5. Integration manager

Integration manager enables IdentityIQ to seamlessly connect with other third party IT security products and tools.

6. IdentityIQ Identity Intelligence

This allows your organization to get a complete and comprehensive view of your data, risks that may be present and compliance issues if any.

(Introduction of SailPoint)

We have briefly seen an ‘Introduction to SailPoint IdentityIQ’ in this post. If you would like to get trained on SailPoint or any other leading Information security certification do visit us at this link.

Bibliography

Identity and Access Management. (n.d.). Retrieved from SailPoint.com: https://www.sailpoint.com/identity-library/identity-and-access-management/

Introduction of SailPoint. (n.d.). Retrieved from asha24.com: https://asha24.net/blog/introduction-of-sailpoint/

AUTHOR
Jayanthi Manikandan ( )
Cyber Security Analyst

“ Jayanthi Manikandan has a Master’s degree in Information systems with a specialization in Information Assurance from Walsh college, Detroit, MI. She is passionate about Information security and has been writing about it for the past 6 years. She is currently ‘Security researcher at InfoSec train. “