Cloud Service Providers

Customers

Cloud service providers offering software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) face a tough challenge: The traditional service-delivery model has customer identity data – login, profile, preferences, products – spread across multiple repositories and silos. This model is simply not sustainable as the number of applications grows. It also forces customers to log on multiple times on order to access different applications, or to re-enter preferences from application to application. In this model, it's impossible to keep customers satisfied, or to direct new services and offerings to customers in a focused manner.

Cloud service providers must take a customer-centric approach to identity management – one that allows them to share and reuse identity data for services like authentication, authorization, and profile management across all applications and computing instances.

Large SaaS Provider – Identity as a Shared Service

A financial service provider with over a million users had multiple consumer-facing and small business applications that all acted separately. The company needed a way to view all customers of all applications holistically, versus only seeing them on a per-application basis.

Using the UnboundID product suite, they were able to unify data from their multiple separate application data sources and create a shared service that enabled reuse of identity data across applications and services. Application developers now leverage this shared service for customer identity and profile data, while still retaining their original databases for application-specific data.

With unified identity, their customers can now take advantage of a single log-in to view all the products they've purchased. Plus they can see their profile and preferences carried with them as they purchase new services and interact with customer service and billing departments. And the provider's marketing department can now tailor cross-sell and up-sell messages to the specific services the customer owns.

SaaS Marketing Automation Provider – Identity as a Shared Service

A leading SaaS marketing automation provider was struggling with user experience and identity data redundancy issues. The issues stemmed from customers running multiple application instances to address scalability and data separation requirements (e.g., North American division vs. European division). Global administrators at these customers were forced to manage multiple accounts (one per instance) and administer each instance independently, which was very time consuming and error prone.

Using the UnboundID product suite, the company was able to create a shared-services layer that enables a single account to manage multiple app instances and the reuse of identity data across instances. Global administrators at customers can now take advantage of single sign-on across their application instances, improving customer satisfaction and facilitating the growth of their application usage. By centralizing per instance administrative data, they are able to provide a more cohesive and efficient experience for administrators.