The end of an era is upon us, as SAP has announced the end of life for their identity governance and administration (IGA) platform — a platform that supported several SAP products.
Without this pivotal identity management tool, where are customers to go to protect the digital identities of their organization? And how can they know that any new platform will be trustworthy?
SAP hasn’t left their customers in a lurch. Their products, protocols and practices are fully supported by the IGA vendor they have trusted to continue the data protection of their faithful customers.
Planning for the end of SAP Identity Management (IDM)
SAP’s process for looking for a new vendor was stringent, as it needed to support all SAP products, migrations practices and policies to ensure business continuity for their clients.
Their guidelines for transition involved a very large proof of concept with which they challenged IGA vendors. The vendors were required to meet a very specific set of requirements that would support SAP products and ensure a smooth and secure migration.
Core requirements for the proof of concept:
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Supports industry standards: SAML, OIDC, SCIM, X.509
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Diverse set of adoption levels throughout their customer base
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Support for both on-prem and cloud workloads
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Easily integrate with cloud identity services to support industry standards
Core SAP products vendors needed to support:
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Fieldglass
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SuccessFactors
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SAP Cloud Identity Services
SAP recommends Identity Manager
One Identity natively supported all these requirements, as SAP and One Identity have been development partners around IGA for many years. One Identity completed all the use cases set forth by SAP, which led to SAP recommending the IGA solution Identity Manager by One Identity as the migration platform of choice.
Identity Manager has a long track record of support for ABAP workloads and has a certified connector by SAP. It provides trusted identity management and security that hardens an organization’s security posture and streamlines workflows with centralized visibility and control over identities throughout their lifecycle.
It was a strong choice, but the question remained: How would all the SAP IDM customers migrate to Identity Manager?
Where ASCONSIT comes in
Since the SAP IDM end of life loomed over the cybersecurity community, the plans for migration accelerated.
ASCONSIT provided the perfect migration solution for the pivotal migration from SAP IDM to the recommended IGA solution, Identity Manager by One Identity. This powerful migration tool is FASTlane.
Trusted for its experience in SAP, with Identity Manager and with platform-to-platform migrations in general, ASCONSIT became a sort of migration hub for Identity Manager. And FASTlane became the migration highway that would optimize the migration between these platforms.
Why, one may ask? How does FASTlane work?
What is FASTlane?
FASTlane is basically a collection and data analysis tool combined with a consulting service. It collects relevant information from SAP IDM for external storage in two parts:
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Information analysis: FASTlane analyzes the system’s data and connectors, including all custom workflows within the system, all connections, system size and any customizations related to entry types and attributes. This analysis function can be used as a sort of cleanup process, as data can be analyzed and deemed outdated or unusable during this step, offering a fresh start with clean data after migration.
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Day one migration: Importation from A to B takes place within a cloud-based instance using Identity Manager On Demand by One Identity to swiftly and securely push high-priority data first. This allows for immediate data utilization using step-by-step migration that makes more heavily used information accessible faster — even within minutes. This can be done with on-premises versions of SAP IDM and pushing it into the cloud.
Conclusion
With the looming end of life of the SAP identity governance and administrationIDM solution, a migration to a new IGA solution will soon become necessary. But SAP has done the work for you with its recommendation of One Identity Manager by One Identity as its soon-to-be replacement.
One Identity, in turn, has teamed with ASCONSIT to give users a pathway to fast, secure migration through their tool FASTlane. This migration solution is one more step in the upcoming mandatory migration processes – a step that provides a swift, simplified, secure exchange from SAP to their trusted alternative, One Identity Manager.
