SecureAuth is placing heavy emphasis on the growing use of cloud applications. It supports several major cloud providers, including Salesforce.com and Google Apps, out of the box (the administrator need only provide a URL for the IEP appliance), and enables easy support for any SAML-compliant service. The 6.0 release supports deployment of IEP on Amazon EC2 and adds preconfigured native support for SuccessFactors, Concure, ADP and Microsoft Live@edu.
Coplan says that although remote access to corporate resources is still the most common use case for multifactor authentication, cloud is changing the landscape for the use of combined authentication, SSO and identity management. "Cloud adoption is a catalyst for change," he says. The first step, he explains, is strong authentication for security and risk mitigation, followed by SSO as an incentive to drive user adoption. The next question is the role authentication/SSO plays in an organization's identity management program.
"Enterprises see a change in how applications are consumed, a change in infrastructure and topology, and need better control over who is using what applications," he says. "Authentication and SSO become a kind of choke point where you can start to impose those controls."
The new release also greatly expands IEP's multitenant capacity for supporting "unlimited" applications from a single appliance. (SecureAuth says 90 percent of its appliances are deployed as virtual machines.) So, IEP can be deployed to support different business units, departments, etc., within an enterprise and support a SaaS model across it.
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