What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is for the lifecycle management of employees. In addition to that, we use it to provision accounts and authorizations to target systems. We can do segregate of duties checks based on those authorizations.
How has it helped my organization?
The previous tool we had was an old-fashioned, highly customized tool, and their self-service management was a little bit difficult. With Omada, it's a lot easier to give responsibility to the business instead of IT, and that's one of the big changes that it has made. It's not implemented fully, because there is also a cultural change needed in our company, but Omada does make it possible and we are working on it. That's one of the biggest changes.
Before Omada, we only had SAP and one or two cloud tools but now we have around 50 cloud tools. The whole playing field has changed dramatically. The cost of ownership since we started using Omada has increased, but the landscape has changed a lot also, so it can't be compared with the costs of our old solution.
I don't know how many audit findings, in total, we have been subject to, but Omada reduced that number. I am aware of at least one big finding that Omada helped resolve.
The landscape is much more complex than it used to be. We had one data center, now we have multiple clouds and we have a lot more tools in the cloud. Everything is
at least in the public cloud. The landscape has changed a lot and things have become much more difficult. If we didn't change to Omada, the help desk cost would be a lot higher. That's one thing for sure.
What is most valuable?
The thing that I find most valuable is that Omada consists of building blocks, which means that you can configure almost anything you want without using custom code, making it pretty easy to do. It's possible to connect to multiple target systems and to create one role that consists of different permissions in the different target systems. So one role in Omada can make sure that you have an account in three different systems.
We can do more with Omada than the business could have imagined, especially in the area of security. There is a lot of functionality for the segregation of duties. We can make things safer. The hire-to-retire process is also implemented pretty well. With Omada, we can deliver the functionality that the business requires at the moment. In addition, we will probably be able to handle whatever the business may come up with in the coming years.
What needs improvement?
The backend is pretty good, but the self-service request access screen, the GUI, needs improvement. It's an old-fashioned screen. Also, Omada has reports, but I wouldn't dare to show them to the business because they look like they're from 1995. I know they are working on these things and that’s good, because they’re really needed.
In addition, Omada needs to invest more in its APIs because a lot of companies have API-first strategies. Although it's not Omada's main priority, the APIs they now have are too limited. They need to invest more in making their solution accessible through APIs.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Omada since August 2017.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Omada consists of components, some of which are very stable and some that are not. For example, Omada calculates each identity, each persona, to see what they have access to, and that's quite stable. Their import mechanism; however, is too slow and it's too fault intolerant. It crashes once in a while for various reasons. It cannot always handle wrong data input.
You can of course accept a certain error rate or fault rate, but still, sometimes if one thing fails, if there's one wrong object, all the other functionalities are also aborted, which is frustrating if you have 20 new employees starting.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We're on-prem, so scalability in the sense of plugging in extra memory is something we need to do ourselves. For the scalability of its functionality, it's pretty good. You can add new target systems, for example, and new applications. If you want to use new functionality, you can build your own processes that work well.
The only problem with its scalability is the import part because an import for a target system can take quite some time, up to three or four hours. In the end, we can run into an issue where there is more imports to be done than hours we have in a day. But overall, it's pretty scalable.
We have 6,000 employees and we now have around 800 to 1,000 external people who are not in our HR system; they are contractors. We are also managing 64 technical systems from Omada and behind that are around 500 to 600 applications.
In terms of administering Omada, we do almost everything ourselves with two to three FTEs. It's not only operations, but it's also the development of Omada. That is always ongoing because we bring on new target systems that we need to onboard into Omada. We also get different requests for new processes in Omada. We have a partner who helps us at some points, but their role is mostly QA.
If we ask for technical support, it is more because of an incident or things that are not documented properly. If we want to implement something new which isn't documented, our partner might be unable to help because of that. Then we go to Omada.
How are customer service and support?
If you are contacting them for a major issue, the support is good. If it is a more simple question, it could take up to months to be resolved.
It also depends on us. If we formulate the question correctly, in an extensive way, then most of the time we get an answer pretty quickly. But if we're a little bit vague, they don't know what to do with it and they keep it on the backlog because we don't have a service level agreement on that.
In general, support has improved and evolved in the last couple of years but a big downside of Omada is that if you have, for example, Okta, SailPoint, or Azure AD, you can Google it and find people who ask questions about it. If you Google for anything about Omada, you won't find anything. There isn't a big community. Omada introduced its hub, where you can ask questions, but it's limited to registered users. There are also different hubs for partners, customers, and Omada employees, so not all the information and all questions can be found in one place.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used a tool called UMRA, User Management Resource Administrator. It's a tool from 2004, and it's a brilliant tool, but it's a little bit outdated. It was a custom tool with everything customized for us, and is fine if you only use Active Directory. But we now have 64 technical systems connected and it wouldn’t be possible for UMRA to handle them, or at least not as quickly as Omada can.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup should have been straightforward, but because of the SAP implementation at our company, it was still pretty complex. The initial step in the implementation was to hook up our SAP systems to Omada, set up the identity life cycle management and to connect the access rights for SAP systems. Our SAP systems are quite complex and had some technical depth to them, which we needed to solve via Omada, which was horrible. Even though it was a simple setup, it still became pretty complex.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI because we moved to Omada in 2018. We had a new policy that was more cloud-native, and if we did not have Omada we wouldn't have been able to facilitate that. Omada facilitated our company's move to the cloud.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In the past, each tool was the same, they all were custom-built tools, as were UMRA and Omada. But they all evolved or they created new tools. I don't have enough experience with other tools, only a little bit of experience with Okta, and there's a big difference between Okta and Omada. Okta is an authentication tool and not an Identity Governance tool. It's trying to be that, but it's not as far as Omada, it cannot do what Omada can.
What other advice do I have?
My advice would be to put good people from your company in Omada because it is a complex tool and you can do a lot with it, but you won't get all the benefits out of it unless you invest in it on the technical side. Then, on the other end, the business needs to be responsible for IGA.
In general, it doesn't matter which tool you take, it doesn't matter if you take Okta, SailPoint, or One Identity, your business needs to be responsible for IGA. It is important to invest in your IT team so that they can configure Omada because that will give you faster value from the product.
The tool alone is not the solution for everything. You need to have dedicated IT guys on it who can configure it.
What I see with Omada, but also with other companies, is that IGA is falling somewhere between IT and business. A business could be responsible and have no IT guys involved or the other way around. IGA is a complex landscape where the business is responsible for authorizations and segregation of duties and the lifecycle management, but on the other hand, the configuration of IGA tools, like Omada, also gets pretty complex.
When moving to the cloud, you need to have a faster time to market. Identity is the new security parameter and the core security parameter. You need to have people at your company who know what they are doing with Omada and who know how to configure it. They also need to know how to resolve issues if somebody gets hacked. Invest in your people to bring identity at the IGA level of your IT, and also of your business, to a higher level.
Omada offers training and they have documentation of the application on their hub, their community site. I don't think they provide certification, at least not the classic type where you can do an exam. But they have added a lot of training in the last one or two years. They didn't have a lot and now they have a lot more, so that's growing.
I would rate Omada an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
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