Omada Identity Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using Omada since August 2017. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

I've been working on a big project for a public sector in Sweden. We permission the identities coming from the HR system to go to the active directory.

Omada has helped to reduce the number of help desk tickets and requests by a lot. 

Omada has made a huge difference because we have the security and we have the optimization of the identities. We get the rights and value. Every person could do it by themselves. The best thing when using an identity access management system is the optimization and base security that comes with it.

The Governance and self-service that can be set up so you can use them yourself to work in the system are the most valuable features. End users can be enabled to help themselves. 

The reports are also quite easy. There are out-of-the-box reports you can use. You can set up different classifications. For a governance solution, it includes everything you would want.

We do segregation of duties. We can set up different combinations of access that we want.

PowerShell is probably easier to use. In the other products I have used, you can just provide all the shell amounts. It's more tricky with Omada.

It's user-friendly but there's room for improvement. 

The security permission inside Omada also needs improvement. It's tricky to set up.

We started using Omada almost exactly two years ago. 

The stability is quite good. I haven't seen any problems with it. 

There are around 2,000 users. Omada requires three to four employees for maintenance. 

I have also used Micro Focus IDM. Micro Focus is easier to develop but a bit trickier for a customer to use. I think that if you have automatic systems, where you just want things to happen in the background, Micro Focus is great and one step ahead of Omada. But if you want to be part of the process and make access requests, Omada is really good there. The Governance and some of the access management are really good. But the automatization flow is easier in Micro Focus.

The initial setup was complex. We did it manually because I was a senior expert. Better to do it that way, because otherwise, it's hard to get it to work. It has a complex installation procedure. 

The first time I did it, it took around two weeks. But now I can do it in a couple of days.

My strategy was to follow the installation guidance. 

It's a matter of time before our customers see ROI from Omada.

My advice would be to have a lot of information about the different states of resources because it's quite easy to do something wrong. 

I would rate Omada an eight out of ten. For it to be a ten, there should be better documentation. I think that will come in a few years when the product is bigger and there is improved documentation and more forums where you can find codes. It can also be quite hard sometimes to set up a new system.

We are using Omada Identity Cloud, their SaaS version, as part of our identity and access management proposition towards our customers. We are an IT security company situated in the Netherlands. What we're trying to do: We give our customers guidance in their needs, aims, and goals regarding identity and access management. Therefore, we are the trusted partner for our customers in order to give them control over their identity and access management landscape, and we use Omada for this. We provide managed services for our clients.

It is all cloud native. What we do, we say, "Dear customer: We can help bring your landscape under control from an identity and access management perspective. For that, we use Omada as our platform."

Omada Identity Cloud is part of our proposition to help us manage environments. If we don't have a product underneath, then it is quite difficult. Therefore, we had to choose a product solution to make our proposition believable.

The governance part is the most valuable feature. The governance processes are defined, and it is quite easy to report upon the compliance. The compliance reporting is very good. 

From my perspective, the IGA features cover everything and are quite broad.

They need to improve the cost for small companies.

We have just started to use this solution.

The scalability of the product is good. There is a lot of functionality within it, without paying extra costs. It is quite complete on its own, and there are no hidden costs. 

It scales in terms of numbers and types of identities. It can govern the on-premise applications as well as the cloud applications. So, it can manage hybrid environments with all types of identities and various load amounts. 

They know what they are doing when setting up the business because this is their core business. There is no waiting time if you need to schedule a meeting with them. They provide a quick response time. Compared to other solutions, their response time is fast and done in a short amount of time.

We are starting the configuration stage right now. 

The initial setup has been straightforward. It is a quick setup, which is flexible and user-friendly.

They set up the environment, which makes it almost immediately available for us. Then, we can configure the solution for our customers' needs, as the customer wants, and as we think is best for our customers. That makes it flexible, so we do not have to make any big investments in terms of hardware.

We have a customer lead who is responsible for all contact with a given customer. We also have a project manager finishing the implementation process, then we have a couple of engineers and a solution architect. There are about five people who are involved.

With a SaaS solution, you don't have to buy something, install it, and activate it on your balance sheet. That is one of the clear benefits. 

They offer a complete solution. However, the pricing is too high for SMBs.

With the cloud solution, spinning up the system is quite easy. Afterwards, you configure and pay for all the use by customers, which is then paid by the customers.

We evaluated other vendors from the Gartner Magic Quadrant (the ones that were near Omada Identity Cloud) when looking for a solution. 

We are just starting with this product. We have a clear vision of what we want with our proposition, so we chose Omada Identity because it is a good product in regards to scalability and being a cloud-native solution.

We feel Omada has the same understanding of what is going on in the market as us. Our strategies are quite well-aligned. The decision to choose Omada Identity Cloud was not only about the product, but at least 50 percent about the company too.

It is very important that it is a cloud-native solution. The world is moving towards the cloud, which is a trend that you cannot change. Based on that, it is quite evident that you want a partner that has a product from a cloud-native perspective. Assets are less on-premise and more on the cloud now, so it's more about functionality and processing as well as taking it as a service. We want to move along with that trend.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10. There is always room for improvement.

My primary use cases of this solution are to manage the life cycle of identities, manage authorizations for applications, and the re-certification of authorizations.

The most valuable feature of this product is that it gives you a dashboard on which applications the user has access. It's also a user-friendly solution. 

I would like to see some additional functionality and improvements in usability.

I have been using this solution for one and a half years.

This solution's stability is fine, with no issues. Maintenance requires three to four people.

We had good support from the supplier for this product.

Before you start implementation, you should think about the impact the solution will have on the company. Also, if you have very old or obsolete data, you should remove it prior to implementation. I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Omada Identity Suite is an extremely flexible solution providing easy customisation of anything from process flows to role assignment rules and compliance reports. It’s handled almost exclusively through configuration, not development. Reacting on new requirements can be handled swiftly.

The whole IT side of offboarding/onboarding of employees/external consultants is centred on OIS. A tight integration between the HR system, OIS and AD ensures a high level of compliance while reducing manpower to a minimum.

The suite’s flexibility within the area of continuous violation detection and handling could be improved. I have not used the latest version, but I have been told that some work has been put into this area recently by Omada.

Eight years.

Generally, a very robust system running on Windows/MS SQL.

I have experience with rather large companies that have OIS handling thousands of identities and without worrying much about load balancing, server clusters, etc.

Above average.

I have worked with Sailpoint’s IIQ and I believe that on quite a high number of features (functional and nonfunctional), OIS is superior. I can only think of one area in which Sailpoint could claim to have reached a higher level of maturity: continuous recertification of accesses.

Considering the scope of the project, the setup was quite straightforward.

No knowledge of the pricing model.

No.

Despite the high level of flexibility in the SW, I recommend implementing the standard IAM processes/functionality that OIS offers and expand scope/customise from there.

Our general use cases include: 

• User onboarding
• User out-boarding
• Role-based access control, e.g., whenever a person's role is changed from one to another, then all the related roles need to be changed.
• Role management 
• Asset management 
• Re-certification, audits that happen every quarter. Every quarter a manager has to certify all his subordinates' access, whether that expertise should be gained or not, or whether they'll be skipped.

The most valuable aspect of the product is that it is Microsoft-based and it supports all Microsoft technology. It is ingrained with Microsoft and we implemented it ourselves for our clients wherein we can request software to install from Omada. That is something they have implemented and they are getting a lot of value out of. 

In terms of improvement, there are not so many out of the box connectors available in the current version. So what they have improved in the latest version is more out of the box connectors for integration, that is one improvement. 

Then there is the recertification process. When the recertification process is launched that makes Omada very slow. There are performance issues in the current version.

We have been working with Omada Identity Suite for around one year. 

There have been some performance issues during the re-certification process, so it works well whenever the re-certifications or audits are not launched but the re-certification makes it very slow. 

We haven't tried doing scaling it yet, so I don't know about that.

I personally have not contacted their support because I don't support our Omada current clientele but our clients have contacted Omada quite often when they required line support. They said the support was fine. 

Omada people came in on-premises and they helped with the installation, so it was a joint effort from the client and Omada. Our client takes care of the maintenance. They are enterprise size and use Omada on a daily basis. 

Licenses are only for installations and support problems. They are definitely additional costs.

I would recommend this solution if you are more Microsoft based technology. If not then I wouldn't recommend Omada, because it mainly works on Windows. It has been a market leader and Omada is growing, but it's not quite there with the current version. I would definitely recommend version 12.0 Omada.

In the next release, I would like to see more governance.

I would rate Omada a seven out of ten. The reason for that being is that it's good but it has got some limitations. Some performance improvements can be done.

I have this solution at two different sites and they are completely different setups.

The most valuable feature is the automatic provisioning and reconciliation of things like the Active Directory groups and memberships.

You can set up automated processes so that you don't need to have an AD administrator doing it all. You can automate processes and control who is allowed to do what. All of these features are quite good.

The way they do the connection to external systems for the provisioning and for the reconciliation is also very good.

The user interface should have a more flexible design, where you can change it to your requirement. It is not an agile design, so it doesn't reformat itself for small devices like tablets or mobile phones (i.e. fluid design). 

One year.

In a stable environment, it's reasonably stable.

You can kind of provoke it into being less stable. There is a thing called ROPE (Reconciliation and Policy Engine) that can sometimes be a bit tricky. Otherwise, it is mostly stable.

On my side, I consider it relatively easy to scale. I have been involved with customers that have worldwide organizations running with it. There are guidelines for scaling to that kind of size. Generally, scalability is ok.

Frankly, everybody in the company uses it because it is used to apply for permissions. Our internal administration team is between ten and twelve people, whereas there are a couple of thousand end-users.

I have had no problem with technical support. I have enrolled two similar people, with access to their partner website as well. In the partner's site, there is help available outside of the Omada family of products. 

I find the initial setup quite straightforward, however, I can imagine it being complex for some people. It can become very complex with the connections to external systems. I know of one customer here who has had very great problems with it, but another one found it a bit easier.

The main problem is going to be the amount of shoe-horning your own systems into it. That's the big problem; modeling so that everything fits.

We had an integrator working with our in-house team. You can't do it all on your own. You need an integrator, but there are good integrators and poor integrators.

I recommend using this solution and I would rate it a seven and a half out of ten.

Strict governance, ability to scrutinize, and make a granular view.

Governance around user access provisioning and user profiling.

UI and user-friendly adaptivity.

Less than one year.

Slow performance on reports.

OK, with complex questions from us.

Was complex, a lot of org implementation questions, master data issues, process workflows, too much compared to what we needed.

Choose wisely based on needs.

Work hard with your requirements and scope.