One Identity is the simplest to work with and has the best discovery function. There's very little kludge in the software. It's probably the quickest for going from zero to operational of all the alternatives in the marketplace.

What it lacks, compared to some, is specific SAP integration for clients that have that. Our current client doesn't have SAP, so it's not an issue for them. And potentially, SailPoint has more pre-made connectors. That means if you have a large number of systems you want to provision into, then SailPoint is the way to go. 

As for privileged access management, if you have an abnormal number of servers—more than 10,000—a whole lot of network elements, and several types of platforms, you might have to go for CyberArk.

But One Identity is a very good package for most organizations. It's one of the simplest to use. CyberArk is the leader in the marketplace, but typically, it is too complex and too big for Norwegian organizations. One Identity PAM has the simplicity to fit Norwegian businesses. It has enough features for any medium-sized business under 50,000 people and under 10,000 servers. For those organizations, One Identity is a safe pick.

We looked at the product from BeyondTrust. And we looked at CyberArk because that's what you need to do when you start this process. We also looked at a couple of other products, market leaders, according to review sites. But we mainly looked at CyberArk.

We, as an organization, realized quite early that privileged management access is hard. There were solutions that, like CyberArk, were very advanced and had huge legacy support with every type of system known to man. That was very interesting because you never know what you might have. But when we looked into CyberArk, we also felt that the system was a leader because they were first, not because they were the best. It seemed to be quite complex to deploy. Knowing our limits, we felt the Safeguard solution was more of a fit for us, and the user experience was way more intuitive than the CyberArk version. 

Looking at the other competitors, they were more leaning toward a cloud-based solution or were going that way. Of course, we are always trying to get to the cloud—you never get there, but you always talk about it—and we felt that if we were going to keep all of the secrets of the company anywhere other than in our own environment, it would almost be irresponsible to have it on a vendor that always puts things in the cloud. That essentially meant we wouldn't know where they would be.

By deploying it ourselves, at least we know where the keys to the kingdom are, and we control them. The other vendors were not selected because they were too cloud-oriented for such an important part of our company. We needed to keep it ourselves and keep the responsibility in-house, and not put it anywhere else.

Safeguard had the same philosophy, allowing us to do a virtual appliance that we deployed ourselves in our own data centers, keeping every bit of information inside our walls instead of putting it on the cloud. With CyberArk, we could do that as well, but it sure seemed way harder, so we skipped that.

We didn't want to use a whole bunch of vendors. We had already picked One Identity for their two-factor authentication, Identity Manager, Cloud Access Manager, and Password Manager (self-service) solutions. We just sort of drank all the Kool-Aid.

We tried to look for a comprehensive product offering and One Identity was the only one who checked off all the boxes and things that we were looking at to roll down for the next five years. They are a great partner and always willing to work with us. They are awesome.

We did evaluate other vendors: Centrify, Okta, Azure AD, Azure 2FA, and Ping Identity. We were able to quickly rule them out, but these were the main competitors. 

Azure AD is a lot of hype. It sort of sucks. The One Identity product works a lot better, as it's a lot easier to use and GUI-driven with a lot of wizards in it. Azure AD is a bit more complex and doesn't seem like it works all the time. That's why we didn't choose it. It seemed pretty unreliable compared to One Identity.

We looked at a couple of other solutions from CyberArk. The useability of this solution is better. 

We also assessed CyberArk, which is a more robust Privileged Access Management solution compared to One Identity Safeguard. However, it comes with a significantly higher cost.

We did PoC to identify different solutions. We tried several solutions, but it didn't work out. We did a PoC with the One Identity solution, and it was easy to manage because it helped us to meet all the compliance requirements and do other things. That's why we went with this solution.

When we started thinking about approaching such a solution, there was an increased need to digitize or have a platform that helped to provided access control functions. There were a number of solutions in the market, like Oracle and Microsoft. One Identity (per our evaluation) was our selected solution. One Identity won when we match these criteria against other solutions in the market:

• Support
• The system integrator
• Strength of the solution
• Complexity of the solution (less complex than other solutions).

We evaluated CyberArk and BeyondTrust in addition to Safeguard. We went through a bake-off and Safeguard had one of the best sets of functionalities. It even had simple stuff for integration of a checkout proxy ID. You could check out the password and then it would just proxy to the endpoint. An example would an SSH session you needed for an account that was checked out.

CyberArk was going to require a lot of resources, both human and infrastructure resources, that we didn't have the bandwidth to take on. BeyondTrust fell short of some of the use cases that we had. One of the use cases was relationship. We had a core team that decided on the product and when the core team did its scoring, Safeguard came out just a little bit ahead of BeyondTrust and well ahead of CyberArk.

As a long-time Quest partner, this was an easy choice to make. Because we were already partners it made sense to work with their other solutions.  

We checked out a couple of solutions, but I was not a part of the selection process.

We evaluated CyberArk, which was pretty good, but it is very expensive. CyberArk's interface was better. Also, CyberArk's login was not so transparent. We chose One Identity because it has a transparent login in interruption in the network.

We evaluated Safeguard and another product. We ultimately chose Safeguard.

Safeguard is an external (in relation to controlled systems) solution which allows you to record sessions. Its competitor was an agent solution that was put on target servers. With the competitor's solution, there was a risk of disconnecting of a privileged user's recording.

In addition to Safeguard, we looked at a product by the name of CyberArk and one by the name of BeyondTrust. These were the three products that we brought in for a proof of concept. In the summer of 2018, we made the decision to go with Safeguard. Then, between June and July 2019, we had it up and running, starting pilots and rolling it out accordingly.

When we did our scoring criteria on the three products, all the products were very close. What it came down to was price. We had individuals on the cyber team who had previous experience with the One Identity Privileged Access Management product at that time, which was called TPAM back then. Those individuals had a very good relationship and understanding of that tool. This weighed into our decision as well as cost to go with the One Identity Safeguard solution. It was definitely cheaper than the other two products that we evaluated.

We did evaluate other solutions, but this is the best choice. We went with Safeguard because of the flexibility, the interface, and a more seamless migration from the old system to the new system. And costs were a consideration, obviously.

More options where evaluated, like Centrify and CyberArk, before we choose this solution.

We implement this solution upon customer request.

We evaluated ObserveIT and CyberArk.

Yes, I made some comparison on CyberArk, BeyondTrust, SSH and CA.

I compared different solutions, like Oracle.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

We evaluated CyberArk and Splunk.