Gartner defines identity governance and administration (IGA) as the solution to manage the identity life cycle and govern access across on-premises and cloud environments. To accomplish this, IGA tools aggregate and correlate disparate identity and access rights data, and provide full capability controls over accounts and associated access.
Gartner defines SaaS management platforms (SMPs) as software tools that aim to help organizations discover, manage, optimize and automate the SaaS application life cycle from one centralized console. Core SMP capabilities include discovery, cost optimization, employee self-service via an application store, insights to increase adoption and automation of onboarding/offboarding activities. As SaaS adoption accelerates, IT leaders will struggle to discover and support SaaS-hosted applications in accordance with company, market or geographic policies and regulations. Increased SaaS costs — combined with limited visibility into the entire SaaS portfolio (including unapproved SaaS) and high levels of overdeployed and underconsumed licenses — result in significant financial, operational and cybersecurity risk.
Software asset management (SAM) tools aim to decipher the complex and ever-changing world of software licensing. Organizations now have a diverse set of SAM tool requirements to meet. Core capability of SAM tools include discovery, normalization, reconciliation, optimization and reporting. SAM tools are third-party solutions that provide some level of automation to support tasks required to produce and maintain compliance with independent software vendor (ISV) license use rights. SAM tools provide organizations with a means to manage software throughout its life cycle and centralize the view of software within the organization. SAM tools provide data on software utilization, identify over deployed and under consumed licenses, reharvest and reallocate licenses, track renewals and financials for purchased software, and proactively identify software misconfiguration. SAM tools offer integration with third-party tools, and can provide out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and produce management dashboards. The reporting and dashboards recommend areas for optimization.