According to Gartner, by the end of 2014, IDaaS (Identity Management-as-a-Service) will account for 25 percent of all new IAM sales, compared to less than 5 percent in 2012. At the same time, the explosion of cloud-based apps is taking the enterprise by storm.

In fact, OneLogin’s 2013 State of Cloud Application Access Study showed that 78 percent of respondents plan to increase the number of cloud apps in their organizations this year.

As we reach this tipping point in cloud adoption, it’s important for IT pros to ask the right questions of cloud identity management providers.

-Is Active Directory integration batch or real-time?
-Is there a planned downtime or read-only mode for any portion of your IAM product during upgrades or maintenance windows?
-What set of pre-integrations does your IAM solution offer?
-How extensible is your IAM solution?
-Do you have access to user-provisioning with entitlements?
-How flexible is your IAM solution in terms of defining password constraints, session timeouts, IP address restrictions and enforcing Multi-Factor -Authentication, and can you apply these policies at the account level, to individual groups or to specific users?
-Are administrative roles and privileges fixed or flexible?
-Can you assign security policies to specific users independent of granting their access to their apps?
-What else can you do with Active Directory Groups besides simply grouping people and apps?
-How easy is it to define a logical structure for application access that doesn’t correlate exactly with Active Directory Groups?
-How does your IAM solution increase worker productivity and/or break down SaaS data silos?
-How quickly will you need to add additional applications to your system? Will your IAM solution require an extra charge?

Check detaisl of the Twelve Questions for Cloud Identity Management from MSPTODAY