F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) vs. SailPoint Identity Security Cloud

In the current digital world we are moving into, I would recommend F5 for all SMB to enterprise organizations. There are various models to pick from. This helps secure the environment and make the network robust to any sort of attacks. I am not able to think of any reason why one should not deploy or this device is less appropriate because nowadays every small company has application / ERPs. It is also worthwhile to note in case if all your apps are being deployed in the cloud by another service provider who provides you SAAS access, in that case, you can be at ease as securing these app falls on to the provider. However, should the budget be available I would recommend deploy this and enhancing your security.

Incentivized

We are happy with the management of the Id, accounts where the user can request any access easily. Also the many connector which Sailpoint is offering in order to onboard lots of applications is quite helpful. The access review module has also have been improve so that large campaigns can we work out easily.

Where we see some improvement is on the UI as here it is not so intuitive for the end user, so that we need to make lots of communications and training so that the user is able to understand how to use it.

For the administration and creation of roles it also would be great to have some improvements here to make it more easily its management.

• Source and destination IP Base policy
• Source and application base policy
• Ssl VPN with load balancing and fail over policy working fine.

Incentivized

• The access request work flow and back end process is exceptional. It effectively manages all of the various pieces of a request and presents the completed request to the provisioning agent as a single record. This is very helpful to the efficiency of the process since the provisioning agent only sees the completed request rather than seeing each component as it is approved. Other systems deliver the various request components to provisioning as they are approved but cannot be provisioned without all the components. Thus creating complexity for the provisioning agent and impacting the SLAs with what looks like a delay with the provisioning process.
• The system is robust enough to effectively handle the scale that we need. With 750+ applications, 24,304 individual entitlements to select from, and an average of 10,200 request transactions per month. We have never had any performance issues.
• The system flexible enough to accommodate our complex business needs without needing to customize the base system. We have been able to add significant functionality to the system in order to support the business needs by extending the code rather than altering the base code. This has enabled a simple upgrade of the system without having to re-apply code enhancements.

Incentivized

• CCU Licenses are limited by device and are not shared between APM devices
• User sessions are not stored globally, so persistence can be an issue with users all over the world
• Configuration can get complicated when split up between multiple sites

Incentivized

• Technical adoption requires a high level of training and experience by the implementing teams.
• SailPoint and partners offers very good training courses which I think are very good. An area of improvement can be in providing cloud VMs that users can work with to learn the IIQ tool more effectively at their own pace.

Incentivized

Integration with F5 BIG-IP systems that we plan to keep using for a while.

Incentivized

If F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager usability is fine it's not hard to use if you read the documentation but it does feel dated and could use a responsive design update to modernize user interface to current standards.

Incentivized

Overall usablity is excellent. The product is capable of performing all the expected tasks for a IAM solution.

Incentivized

Support for Customizations is very limited.

Incentivized

Implementation was done correctly and all the requirements were met.

Incentivized

F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager integrates extremely well with the rest of our F5 infrastructure which is a big plus and provides us with a familiar user interface, but it isn't as scalable in its current iteration as something like Zscaler Private Access.

Incentivized

SailPoint is a more customizable solution than Okta, it is also not just a cloud application. Our use of IIQ to manage external suppliers via Azure AD guest accounts was not available on other platforms at the point of deployment. The integration with SAP and other Microsoft services is also second to none.

Incentivized

• Positive is that due to how much F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager can do, the F5 is the landing spot in our environment for MFA authentication.
• It has allowed a technology the company originally bought for load balancing to be used for multiple purposes.
• F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager has made the environment more trusting of F5 as a MFA.

Incentivized

• The ability to automate the employee onboarding processes greatly reduces the staffing requirements for account creation and access assignment
• The self-service capabilities for the account registration and password management tasks have greatly reduced the number of calls to our Help Desk
• The role mining capabilities have reduced the amount of time required to assign and update our user application set mapping