White paper

The 4 A’s of Identity Management are authentication, authorization, account management and audit logging. Currently, when enterprise employees access cloud applications, authentication is the only “A” with an accepted standard (SAML).

While SAML allows an enterprise to assert identities for employees as they access cloud-based applications relevant to their role, there are cases where the SaaS provider requires an existing account to be waiting for that employee. To date, there is no widely accepted standard protocol for the enterprise to manage (i.e., create, delete) these cloud identities. Consequently, various SaaS providers have defined their own proprietary interfaces, which means enterprise customers are forced to support a variety of logically similar but differently formatted interfaces.