Although the benefits of cloud efficiencies are well-understood, most large companies recognize it’s not easy to convert thousands of apps across the enterprise to take advantage of the cloud. So, most organizations take a pragmatic approach: let’s adopt more SaaS applications where we can. Then, we’ll gradually modernize existing apps and retire the legacy ones that are too expensive to re-architect. For the foreseeable future, these organizations perceive themselves as being in a hybrid state.
In this hybrid state, it’s critical to secure access to every app and workload (wherever they may be) to ensure a seamless experience for users. This access should be based on policies and context. In other words, your identity and access management (IAM) solution will have a huge impact on the success of your cloud journey. Looking at the major IAM vendors today, you can classify them into 3 categories, each based on their approach to solving this hybrid challenge:
