Cloud IAM: European identity and access management

Who is...

François-Guillaume Ribreau

François-Guillaume Ribreau

François-Guillaume Ribreau, CEO of Cloud IAM.

Company profile

Cloud IAM

The interview

Q: What is your name?

My name is François-Guillaume Ribreau, I'm a former system architect and developer at Ouest-France and I founded Cloud IAM in 2018. IAM stands for Identity and Access Management.

Q: What is your product?

Back in 2018, my employer the Ouest-France journal was looking for a unique identifier system (like France Connect). Since I had a similar request from the Bretagne region and the LeDuff group, I decided to launch a company and try to respond to these three requests. Cloud IAM is built on top of the Keycloak open source solution. We addressed a number of shortcomings of Keycloak from security, maintenance and software life cylce to supervision and backup. Fast forward four years later and we are a growing team of 30 employees and our solution CloudIAM is a critical component of many IT systems of over 100.000 customers. 

Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?

CloudIAM is an open source SaaS solution. We also provide consulting services.

Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?

The most common existing solutions are either Chinese or American and all hyperscalers provide their own solutions, whether it is Google, Amazon or Alibaba. They are all proprietary and lock you into their ecosystem with closed-source API and limited extensibility. Before Cloud IAM there were no real European alternatives. There are a few providers today, for example Zitadel in Switzerland which is also open source and running a European cloud or 3DS Outscale.

Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?

Cloud IAM simplifies the configuration of Keycloak. You can easily customize the interface and APIs and add continuous integration. The solution is fully open source and reversible. Cloud IAM is easy to extend and focus on interoperability compared to proprietary solutions like AUth0, Okto or LoginRadius. So our unique selling proposition is the radical openess of Cloud IAM.

Q: What are the strong points of your technology?

We are have a lot of partnerships with European institutions (e.g. Digital Breton) and technology providers (e.g. Clever Cloud add-on)

Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?

Some clients we can name are Arte, Forto, Air Liquide, Veoli, the French Ministry of Finance, Bretagne TV, Agile TV from South America. Many european mulitnationals are using Cloud IAM as well as many companies that want to ensure that their data stays within Europe.

Q: Why did this client choose your solution rather the solution of the market leader or GAFAM?

Arte.tv was looking to migrate to European solution providers.

Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoption?

Despite the american Cloud Act, we lost Veolia Water as a customer to Okta although our offer was superior in every aspect. We still have a long way to go until better performance and acknowledgement of solutions made in Europe wins over seniority and household names.

If I was to propose a policy, I think it is unacceptable that public services use and finance proprietary solutions. Public money should only be used to create and use open source solutions.

We should also ensure that our education does not drift too much into a product culture. We need "generalist" developers and engineers who have a 360⁰ perspective to identify new needs and develop solutions. I've been giving courses for 10 years in engineering schools and universities and this is something we need to be aware of on European and national level.

Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?

I would say Arte.tv is a good example of a succesful implementation of Cloud IAM running since 2021. Their contract with LoginRadius was expiring and since Arte was moving from US to European hosting with Scaleway, they also wanted to migrate their IAM solution to a European provider. Arte was seeking an open source solution that would also comply with public procurement requirements. They were already familiar with KeyCloak but wanted a hosted solution which Cloud IAM is providing. Currently we handle about 1000 requests per minute with 100% availability since going into production. We also developed several migration extensions for the switch from LoginRadius to CloudIAM including various export modules. Having Arte.tv as a happy client reference helped us enormously when making our offer to the French finance ministry which has since then also started to use Cloud IAM.


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