SAP and Microsoft have partnered to help enterprises on their journey to the cloud and enable cross consumption of SAP and Microsoft services. Achieving that cross consumption requires first of all seamless identity and access management across both platforms.
Although SAP identity services can be integrated with Microsoft Azure Active Directory even today, I am thrilled to announce some areas where SAP and Microsoft plan to advance the existing integration to enable an even more seamless experience for end users and simplified configuration and management for IT. These improvements will be valid independently of the Identity Provider the customer has chosen as the primary one, whether this is SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication, Azure Active Directory or a third-party one:
Risk-based Authentication, a.k.a. Conditional Access
SAP applications leverage SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication either as a means of an authenticating Identity Provider or as federating to another one. Similarly, Microsoft applications leverage Azure Active Directory to do so. The result of this today is that SAP CP Identity Authentication or Azure AD acts as a proxy Identity Provider and the real authenticating provider knows only about it, but not the concrete application. Thus, risk-based authentication rules (a.k.a. Conditional Access) can be applied only in the proxy identity provider but not in the authenticating one. The planned improvement is to make the applications on the other side "known" to the authenticating identity provider, so that it can apply specific rules to those applications as well and allow for more cohesive access management across the enterprise.
Principal Propagation across services on both platforms
Today, consuming Microsoft 365 services from an SAP Fiori application or vice versa, e.g. consuming SAP services from a Microsoft Office Add-In is possible, but requires quite some development effort and the user experience is not as smooth as it could be. The planned improvement here is to achieve principal propagation across SAP Cloud Platform and Azure Active Directory to enable applications to bring together content and services from both platforms into a seamless, personalized experience for end users.
Initial Configuration
Today, setting up the configuration between SAP identity services and Azure Active Directory requires quite some technical steps. The planned improvement here is to come to a "one-click" configuration experience to connect SAP and Azure Active Directory.
Identity Lifecycle Management
Today customers can leverage SAP Cloud Platform Identity Provisioning service to manage the identity lifecycle across SAP and Azure Active Directory. However, as SAP is open, SAP will work together with Microsoft to enable provisioning from Microsoft Azure Active Directory to SAP applications as well.
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All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates,
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