In the consumer world, user experience and ease of use have emerged as paramount. Recent studies have shown that ease of use is driving brand loyalty across many industries, especially travel and retail. It makes sense that customers come back to applications and websites with the best and easiest user experience. On the flip side, poor user experience or complex processes related to on-boarding can result in measureable revenue impacts.For business applications, cloud applications and technologies have fundamentally changed user expectations for seamless access and ease of use. Applications are required to be intuitive and able to be used with minimal training. Users expect access to be seamless and without a significant process or time delay for assignment of the correct application permissions. Successful cloud applications are designed to enable larger numbers of users easy access to functionality without a significant administrative workload.
Design with the User in Mind
So what does this mean then for designers of cloud-based software applications? The reality is we need to design cleverly, using all of the advantages available to us in cloud technology, to not only meet the functional needs of the organizations and the business user, but also the massive expectancy for modern, easy-to-use, great-looking consumer-grade applications. With such high expectations, the pressure is on to deliver!
But effectively, that’s what we’ve done. When designing our new access analysis service, SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance, we kept these design considerations very much in mind. And with this focus, we’ve been able to introduce an application that:
- Looks great
- Contains functionality that enables a much greater level of automation for the administrative processes required to ensure users are granted the correct roles and permissions within cloud and on-premise applications
- Such functionality includes support for the process of user and role analysis, user refinement, mitigating control assignment, and audit reporting—processes necessary for financial compliance in many countries
- Allows users to extend the capabilities of access analysis in an easy consumption manner, at low total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Enables easier and more compliant access processes
Developed on the Right Platform to Deliver Expected Cloud Benefits
Of course, user experience and simplicity in use is crucial. But to deliver this, one also needs to work with the right software platform. One that will not only allow flexibility in design, but will also help to deliver the right levels of performance at a relatively low cost.
In reality, which software platform to use was probably the easiest choice we had to make, given the availability of the SAP Hana Cloud Platform. But while this platform was a given, we were very appreciative of the significant benefits that it offers in terms of identity-as-a-service capabilities:
- High performance and scalability
- Simple customer on-boarding and off-boarding (the service is available as a cloud subscription)
- Expanded connectivity to other applications running on HCP
With many cloud solutions the time to value is very fast compared to an on-premise solution, and ours is no exception. So what do we have in the end? A cloud-based application that will provide quick time to value, delivered on a high-performance software platform, that’s easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy and scale for enterprise users, at relatively low cost.
In our next blog, we’ll consider some of the other benefits of working with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform to deliver identity and access governance cloud services, and how this is helping us to deliver some new and unique capabilities for continuous access monitoring and access refinement.
For More on Identity and Access Governance (IAG)
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