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You probably know Rippling for its workforce, human resource management, and payroll functions. Rippling is your single source of truth when it comes to backend employee management.
From onboarding, remuneration, and off-boarding to day-to-day management like time and attendance, scheduling, and benefits management – there’s a lot you can do with Rippling.
However, it also has a very robust IT security suite, offering features like identity and access management and comprehensive device management.
This review will focus on Rippling’s identity and access management solution, which offers features like Single Sign On (SSO), Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), password management, and role-based user provisioning and access controls.
Rippling IT IAM: Pricing
Rippling is a unified solution for your entire workforce’s needs, including various suites such as global payroll, time and attendance, benefits management, scheduling, recruiting, and so on. Each of their featured suites has a different pricing model, for which you will be required to contact their support team.
We did a bit of digging and found that their identity and access management solution, which offers features like SSO, MFA, role-based access policy, and automated provisioning and deprovisioning, starts at $8/user/month. That’s it – there are no different pricing tiers. You get everything for your identity access management needs in a single plan.
Besides this, if you also want to include device management and inventory management, it will cost you an extra $8/user/month for each of these features.
Although the pricing isn’t displayed on the website directly, I still found the structure to be pretty simple and straightforward. You don’t have to juggle between various pricing tiers or add specific features one by one as you require; in a-la-carte pricing followed by other providers, such as Okta and JumpCloud.
Rippling IT IAM: Features
Rippling makes it very easy to create and manage user groups based on predefined attributes such as job title, department, location, and so on, known as Supergroups.
Instead of having to manually add or remove employees from these groups, Rippling does it automatically based on these attributes. Whenever an attribute is updated, the group is also updated without any manual intervention.
Rippling focuses a lot on role-based permissions, which automate a large chunk of the approval hierarchy, ensuring that admins can focus on more critical tasks. For example, you can set which employee gets admin access based on their attributes, such as department, team, membership, location, and so on.
You can also define the type of data they access and the subset of the organisation these permissions will apply to. Whenever a permission profile is updated, all matching users’ access is adjusted automatically in real time.
Rippling also acts as a comprehensive outbound SSO provider. This means that you can log into Rippling using your Single Sign On (SSO) password and simply click on the app you want to log on the dashboard. There is no need to add additional passwords for individual apps when you use Rippling as an identity provider.
Rippling integrates with 600+ apps for all your SSO needs. Plus, if you do not find an app in the library, you can set up a custom integration with apps that support SAML for SSO and SCIM for user provisioning.
RPass is Rippling’s native, built-in password manager that suggests and remembers strong passwords across your organisation.
What I like the most is that it goes beyond the capabilities of a traditional password manager by integrating behavioural monitoring. For example, if the manager finds a suspicious login from an unknown geographic location, it will block the login attempt, even if the password is correct.
RPass can also be used to share passwords to SuperGroups instead of individual employee-based credentials.
Rippling IT IAM: Interface and in-use
Rippling has done a good job when it comes to interface and in-use experience – the dashboard is quite modern with a minimal design and easy-to-navigate modules. The widgets are fully customizable, and you’ll find various shortcuts that help you launch common tasks quickly.
Onboarding and offboarding can be fully automated, thanks to Supergroups. The Rippling support team will also help you with a quick and smooth initial deployment and implementation. The mobile interface is also pretty slick, allowing admins to manage day-to-day operations on the go.
That said, there is a bit of a learning curve involved with the platform, especially if you’re using multiple modules apart from the IAM suite.
Rippling IT IAM: Support
Just like pricing, there is no upfront clarity on the level of support you can expect with Rippling. However, as per my discussions with the sales team, the platform offers 24/7 customer support through two channels.
Firstly, you can either raise a support ticket on your Rippling dashboard. Alternatively, you can also get support via phone call. I was pretty impressed by the response time, which is actually less than a minute.
Rippling is also one of the few providers that openly advertise their Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), which sits at around 92%.
Plus, more than 45% of the cases are resolved by the first response itself, requiring no further clarifications. And, only 21.34% of the live chat requests are asked to convert into a call, which means that around 78% of the queries are solved on the chat itself without any additional support.
Besides this, there are a lot of online resources such as blogs, webinars, and troubleshooting guides. That’s also a dedicated Help Centre where you can find answers to commonly asked questions.
Overall, I found support to be very comprehensive, with quick response times and high query resolution accuracy.
Rippling IT IAM: Security
Rippling is very conservative when it comes to security and data protection, with various certificates such as SOC1 Type 1, SOC2 Type 2, and SOC3. The certification ensures adherence to the basic trust principles of confidentiality, security, and availability.
Besides this, Rippling is also ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 certified. It is also one of the few providers that holds the ISO 42001 certification.
While the first two certifications ensure that Rippling follows adequate practices to protect private and sensitive data from unauthorized access, the 42001 certification ensures that the platform has an active and robust management system in place to ensure that its AI systems are ethical and safe without any risk of bias or misuse.
Rippling also conducts regular internal and external penetration testing and has an active bug bounty program to find any security vulnerabilities in its infrastructure. Active threat monitoring includes the use of tools such as Web App Firewall (WAF) and Runtime App Self Protection (RASP) to quickly locate and eliminate any threats.
WAF monitors and filters all incoming traffic to protect the platform from threats such as SQL injection, DDoS attacks, and malicious HTTP requests.
On the other hand, RASP is built into the application itself and monitors its behaviour to protect against zero-day vulnerabilities, insider misuse, and malicious API behaviours.
Overall, I found Rippling’s security infrastructure to be pretty robust, and they have gone the extra mile to incorporate additional measures beyond what is required by law.
Rippling IT IAM: Competition
Rippling is a robust identity access solution. However, not everyone’s needs are the same. If it doesn’t align with what you’re looking for, here are a couple of options you can look at.
Plus, its Identity Threat Protection features continuously monitor all your live sessions and immediately flag any suspicious behaviours. It is also a bit less expensive than Rippling, with starter plans priced at $6/user/month.
If you only have limited needs and do not need the full suite of identity access management solutions, you can go with OneLogin, which features an affordable à la carte pricing model. Features like MFA, SSO, and Active Directory start at just $2/user/month each. It also has more than 6000+ third-party applications.
OneLogin employs Vigilance AI, its proprietary threat detection engine, to assign a risk score to each login attempt and decide whether additional authentication is required or not.
Rippling IT IAM: Final verdict
Rippling’s IT identity access management solution offers essential features such as multi-factor authentication and single sign-on on along with comprehensive password management and access controls.
Admin can form Supergroups based on predefined attributes, such as employee location, department, and job title. Application access and security controls can then be aligned with these groups without having to individually assign them.
What I like the most is that Rippling integrates with more than 600+ third-party apps so that you can provision your SSO needs across multiple applications. And for those that you do not find on the integration list, you can set up a custom Integration with the help of SAML and SCIM.
Rippling’s support is one of the best I have seen across the industry, with a response time of less than one minute and a customer satisfaction score of 92%.
Although the pricing is not fully transparent, you can expect the plans to start from $8/user/month, which is more expensive than the likes of Okta and JumpCloud. Even at this higher price point, you do not get as many features as Okta.
That said, Rippling is just not an IAM solution but offers a wide range of services such as payroll, recruitment, and comprehensive human resource management.
So if you already use Rippling for those purposes, it makes sense to go with the IAM solution too, since it syncs seamlessly with existing HR profiles.
