Many companies are struggling to adopt cloud-based identity and access management (hosted IAM) because they typically end up overscoping this initiative or have a difficult time getting funding for it in the current economic climate. Organizations that have successfully adopted hosted IAM look to improve the overall end-user experience and move IAM out of the back office to the user's desktop. They also pay special attention to integrating hosted IAM with the company's identity repositories — Active Directory (AD) or lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) — and proactively include hosted options in their IAM cost-benefit analysis.