Earlier this month, SAP announced it would be shutting down its SAP Identity Management (SAP IDM) services in 2027, with extended maintenance offered until 2030. This week, Microsoft revealed that SAP IDM customers will be able to transition over to the company"s Entra ID services beforehand.
Microsoft and SAP are currently working together to give SAP IDM customers a way to transition their identity confirmation needs over to Entra ID. In its own blog post this week, Microsoft stated that it was "honored" that SAP picked it to help move its SAP IDM users to Entra ID.
Microsoft also claims that Entra ID is already well integrated with other SAP systems, adding:
The collaboration enables the use of cloud-based services that help organizations efficiently integrate systems with consistent identities and access governance while also eliminating reliance on on-premises identity and access management components for identity management.
Microsoft and SAP will offer more details in the coming months on how SAP IDM users will be able to move their systems to support Entra ID. Since the full shutdown of SAP IDM won"t happen for a number of years, that should give those customers plenty of time to figure out how to replace it.
SAP"s closing of its identity management services was revealed a couple of weeks after the company announced a major restructuring plan. That plan will include voluntary buyouts or job changes for 8,000 of SAP"s employees, or about 7 percent of its total workforce. SAP claims the total number of its employees will remain about the same at the end of 2024 as it plans to offer more cloud-based solutions.
Microsoft renamed its Azure ID cloud-based identity services to Entra ID in July 2023. More recently, the company announced a new feature for Entra ID customers called Face Check. It allows a company to match a person"s photo to a verified image of themselves from a driver"s license or passport.