Symplified Links Identity, User Management for Cloud Applications
Symplified Identity Manager automates user account provisioning, administration, and synchronization.
Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor's statements.
Symplified, a cloud security company, announced Symplified Identity Manager (SIM), which centralizes identity and user management for cloud applications and synchronizes with both on-premises and cloud identity data stores. SIM combines policy-based provisioning with delegated and self-service administration capabilities, to automate account management for millions of consumer users. To meet the needs of large, midsize, and small organizations, SIM supports virtually all identity repositories and technologies including Active Directory, LDAP, Google, SalesForce.com, databases, and SAML.
The massive adoption of cloud computing is creating significant identity management challenges for organizations, which grow in complexity with each new cloud application. According to research firm IDC, the total market for cloud and mobile security is worth around $4B today, and is forecast to hit $6B by 2015.
To reduce the cost and time associated with user management for the cloud, SIM automates the process of adding, updating, and removing user accounts and entitlements across applications in private or public clouds. SIM provides a centralized and policy-based mechanism to provision and remove user accounts, synchronize identity data between on-premises and cloud user stores, grant application access permissions, define role-based access controls, enforce security policies for password strength, provide single sign-on (SSO) and audit and report on usage. It also includes an e-mail workflow process for administration tasks that require multi-level approvals.
Delegated and Self-Service Administration
For organizations with large user populations, SIM provides facilities for delegating user management functions to improve security, productivity, and scalability. The delegated administration capability enables companies to push management responsibility for user accounts to subsidiaries, branch offices, departments, customers, partners, and others who have been granted access to cloud resources. To further improve efficiencies, SIM provides a self-service option that allows individual users to perform password resets, update profile information, and request access to new applications. With SIM, IT administrators have complete control over which management capabilities can be exposed in the delegated administration and self-service user interface.
“The complexity of managing identity data and user accounts for multiple cloud applications can quickly erase the operational benefits that attracted companies to the cloud to begin with,” said Darren Platt, CTO of Symplified. “Symplified Identity Manager is designed to make user management for the cloud so automated, seamless, and low maintenance that nearly no additional IT resources are needed.”
Synchronizing Identity Stores
To extend on-premises identity repositories to cloud applications, SIM provides a unique policy-based Sync capability that can synchronize user account information in Active Directory, LDAP, and databases to Salesforce.com, Google, Taleo, and others. Sync detects new accounts and -- based on their assigned rule set -- will automatically provision access to the appropriate cloud resources and establish SSO.
It can map attributes between identity stores that use different conventions, and will track and implement changes over the complete lifecycle of the account without IT administrator intervention. When an account is “deprovisioned” in the source repository, Sync automatically removes the identity from each cloud application to avoid orphan accounts.
Pricing and Availability
Symplified Identity Manager is available immediately from Symplified and its business partners worldwide. Pricing starts at $1 per user/month. Additional information is available at www.symplified.com.