1.Identity Management as a Service (IdMaaS) is a cloud-based identity management solution that allows customers to take advantage of identity Management (IdM) technologies without having to invest in the underlying hardware or applications.

2.IdMaaS provides automate the management of user identities, access rights and resources across multiple clouds, IT enviourments and applications. They often provide break-through capabilities that are not available in traditional applications.

3.With the growing use of cloud, a cloud-native architecture is required to manage identity for services on various private and public clouds.

4.The architecture must provide a portable, pervasive identity across multiple clouds.Identity and access management as a service builds on the basic idea of software as a service (SaaS) that started in recent years, as vendors were able to effectively "stream" services over the Web rather than provide them as licensed software packages, such as in CDs and boxes.

5.Vendors started offering a wider range of cloud-delivered SaaS products, such as platform as a service (PaaS), communications as a service (CaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

6.Network virtualization and the abstraction of hardware into logical tools further accelerated this development.IAMaaS helps companies set up customized levels of security for an IT architecture, either as a whole or in parts.

7.The essential idea is that a third-party service vendor sets up user identities and determines what these individual users can do within a system. Like the old identity and access management tools, the way these services work is through a complicated process of tagging and labeling individual users and user behaviors, and then creating a detailed security authentication for them.

8.IAMaaS is even more applicable to companies that allow employees to use or bring their own devices for work. In many cases, the use of different devices requires tighter security to protect trade secrets and other confidential information. Most enterprises are now migrating traditional IT infrastructures to the cloud, and they are finding the need to securely manage identities for data center and cloud applications and systems.

9.The rapid rise of threats across the dynamic enterprise perimeter is posing new challenges, such as:

•Integrating cloud technologies with older, on-premises systems and centrally managing governance of IT resources

•Controlling compliance costs associated with deploying flexible and scalable cloud-based identity governance

•Demonstrating compliance with a growing number of regulatory requirements, including new data privacy rules in the European Union

10.IDMaaS governs and controls access of critical applications and services using automation and reporting from a structured environment.

11.IDMaaS includes modern application connectors that enable you to add a new service with appropriate role management within days, rather than months, resulting in shorter time to market, reduced costs and increased productivity.

12.It also allows you to concentrate on your core business without worrying about finding and retaining staff with high-demand identity management skills.

13.Service features:

IDMaaS enables your organization to adopt a business approach to consistent security policies and compliance. Key components include:

•Governance Platform. Supports compliance, provisioning and access management processes across your organization by centralizing identity data and providing a single location from which to model roles, policies and risk.

•Compliance Management. Streamlines execution of compliance controls and improves audit performance by automating access certifications and policy management.

•Lifecycle Management. Simplifies the process for creating, changing and revoking access privileges by combining self-service access request and password management with automated life-cycle event management for each user.

•Identity Intelligence Services. Transforms technical identity data scattered across multiple enterprise systems, or in the cloud, into centralized, easily understood and business-relevant information.

14.Benefits of IdMaas:

•Improved user productivity: Productivity improvement comes from simplifying the sign-on interface and the ability to quickly change access rights. Productivity is likely to improve further where you provide user self-service.

•Improved customer and partner service: Customers and partners also benefit from a more streamlined, secure process when accessing applications and data.

•Reduced help desk costs: IT help desks typically experience fewer calls about forgotten passwords when an identity management process is implemented.

•Reduced IT costs: Identity management enables automatic provisioning, providing or revoking users’ access rights to systems and applications. Provisioning happens whether you automate it or not.

15.Attributes of IdMaaS Providers:

•Compliance

•Access Provisioning and De-Provisioning

•User Self-Service

•Single Sign-On

•Integration with In-house IdM or Directories

•Security Around IdMaaS

•Setup and Running Costs