News

Microsoft, SailPoint Ink Partnership on Azure AD

• By Kurt Mackie
• February 14, 2017

SailPoint, a provider of identity governance solutions, has entered into a partnership with Microsoft centered around the Azure Active Directory identity and access management service.

According to Microsoft's announcement, the partnership aims to meet the compliance requirements of "highly regulated industries" such as "healthcare, financial services and pharma" that use Azure AD Premium.

SailPoint's solutions are designed to work across services and premises-based software. The Austin, Texas-based company is considered a leader in the identity governance space, according to a Gartner Magic Quadrant paper on the topic published last year.

SailPoint Collaboration
The two companies are working on a "technical collaboration" to address customer needs for compliance and identity governance. SailPoint's solution wasn't named in the announcement, but presumably the two companies are working on a way to integrate SailPoint's IdentityIQ governance product with the Azure AD Premium service.

The collaboration involves synchronizing Azure AD access to applications with SailPoint's solution. With this approach, employee or personnel changes will get associated with the synchronized applications. The integration also aims to add "segregation of duties" controls for end users, which controls how responsibilities get shared within organizations.

In addition, the integration adds a password synchronization capability that works across applications. It allows self-service password resets by end users. This capability "allows a user to change their password once in Azure AD and have it synchronized across a wide variety of on-premises and cloud-based systems," Microsoft's announcement explained.

Lastly, the technology integration is bringing "audit and compliance reporting" capabilities. It "significantly reduces the burden on IT operations teams and improves visibility for the business," Microsoft's announcement explained.

Azure AD B2C Additions
In other Azure AD news, Microsoft this week noted progress for its Azure AD B2C tools for developers. Azure AD B2C is an identity management solution used for Web sites and mobile applications in business-to-consumer scenarios.

Microsoft added single-page app support to Azure AD B2C. The single-page app is a capability, mostly written in JavaScript, that loads a single page for interaction with the consumer.

Another new addition to Azure AD B2C is usage reporting APIs. These REST-based APIs can be used to push Azure AD B2C information into analytics tools. The APIs can be used to create reports on user counts, successful authentications and multifactor authentication counts.

Lastly, Microsoft added an ability for developers to add a friction-free sign-ups when using the Azure AD B2C service. The friction-free sign-up process skips some traditional checks up front, such as e-mail verifications.