SailPoint, the undisputed leader in identity governance, surveyed customers and attendees at this week’s Gartner IAM Summit about their plans for cloud adoption in the next five years. Of the 100 survey respondents, 30 per cent plan to transition more of their mission-critical applications to the cloud in the next two years, and a full 50 per cent indicated that they will take a cloud-first approach for all IT purchases by 2021.

“Moving toward a cloud IT environment means that our IT organisation can focus on enabling the business versus time spent maintaining IT infrastructure. That is the goal of our IT team – to enable our business to build and strengthen customer relationships,” said Andrew K. Linn, SVP and chief information security officer for Orrstown Bank. “With SailPoint’s cloud-based identity governance solution IdentityNow, we’ve deployed an enterprise-wide identity governance strategy. This has given us full visibility into the user lifecycle of every employee within the organisation, allowing our team to focus our resources on meeting our customers’ financial needs.”

Despite an eagerness to take advantage of cloud technology, many enterprises are faced with running a hybrid IT environment. The reality is that many mission-critical applications will remain on-premises, perhaps for years. Importantly, enterprises need to secure their users’ access to all applications – no matter where they reside: on-premises or in the cloud. As more organisations adopt a “cloud-first” strategy, having a cloud-based identity governance solution that encompasses this hybrid environment is critical. Enterprises need to consider the underlying governance foundation: compliance, provisioning, access requests and data access governance. Implementing a cloud-based identity governance program will not only help enterprises quickly lay a strong governance foundation, but will also give them the right visibility and control spanning their entire digital infrastructure. Taking this approach, organisations are in a much better position to charge down the cloud-first path efficiently, effectively and importantly – securely.

“We’re seeing an acceleration of large enterprises moving their identity governance programs to a SaaS delivery model, and these survey results underscore that migration trend,” said Kevin Cunningham, president and co-founder of SailPoint. “This is driven by the time-to-value that SaaS delivers – an identity governance implementation can be delivering value in weeks, allowing organisations to focus their IT resources on enabling the business, securely and confidently.”