---
id: saas-connectivity
title: SaaS Connectivity
pagination_label: SaaS Connectivity
sidebar_label: SaaS Connectivity
sidebar_position: 4
sidebar_class_name: saasConnectivity
keywords: ["connectivity", "connectors"]
description:
  SaaS Connectivity is a cloud based connector runtime that makes developing and
  deploying web service connectors easy.
slug: /docs/saas-connectivity
tags: ["Connectivity"]
---

SaaS Connectivity is a cloud based connector runtime that makes developing and
deploying web service connectors easier than Connector 1.0 does. However,
because the cloud hosts SaaS Connectivity, not a Virtual Appliance (VA), SaaS
Connectivity is limited in the types of applications it can connect to. For
example, you cannot use SaaS Connectivity to connect to on-prem services that
can only communicate within an intranet (no public internet access). This
excludes JDBC and Mainframe applications, to name a few.

## What Are Connectors

Connectors are the bridges between the SailPoint Identity Now (IDN) SaaS
platform and the source systems that IDN needs to communicate with and aggregate
data from. An example of a source system IDN may need to communicate with would
be an Oracle HR system or GitHub. In these cases, IDN synchronizes data between
systems to ensure account entitlements and state are correct through the
organization.

## Why Are We Introducing a New Connector

VA connectors always communicate with external sources through the Virtual
Appliance (VA) as seen in the diagram below:

![Old Connectivity](./img/old_connectivity_diagram.png)

VA connectors can be disadvantageous because you need an on-prem virtual
appliance to have any external connectivity with them, even when that
connectivity is a SaaS service like Salesforce.com.

It is also challenging to create a custom connector in the VA Connector
framework. Therefore, there are generic connectors available such as flat file,
JDBC and webservice connectors. These options provide flexibility in configuring
almost any source, but this configuration can be complex. For example, when you
create a JDBC connector, you must use SQL to define the data model.

The new Cloud connectors work differently - they run on the IDN platform instead
(see diagram below).

![New Connectivity](./img/new_connectivity_diagram.png)

With this process, you can run an entire IDN instance without a VA. The new
connector also includes a CLI tool to manage cloud connectors and an SDK to
create custom connectors. Because it is simpler to create a custom connector,
you can create specific connectors for a variety of sources, and the connectors'
configuration can be much simpler. For example, you can now configure a formerly
complicated webservice connector by providing two parameters (Base URL and API
Key) in a custom cloud connector.
