With its acquisition of Bitkoo, Quest Software can now offer enterprise customers a range of centralized identity and access management products.
Quest Software has acquired Bitkoo, an access-control
technology provider, to enhance its identity and access management portfolio. The
acquisition, which Quest officially announced Dec. 19, has already closed and financial
terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With its latest acquisition, Quest will be able to provide
customers with a more centralized approach for handling authentication within
the enterprise, inside databases, and for cloud-based applications and Web
services. Bitkoo's Keystone technology supports fine-grained authentication and
entitlement management in enterprise IT environments, and will be included in
Quest's One Identity Solutions portfolio, Jonathan Sander, director of business
development for identity and access management at Quest Software, told
eWEEK.
With Bitkoo, Quest customers would be able to use the
XACML-based authorization service for applications built in-house and allow
consistent access management across multiple applications, Web services and
data. Keystone is also capable of providing row- and column-level security
within a SQL Server database without needing custom code.
Quest will be able to "offer organizations the
capability to define granular access controls for users based on user
attributes, the resource and the context of the access request," said Nick
Nikols, vice-president and general manager for identity and access management
at Quest Software.
Organizations are increasingly looking at ways to externalize
authorization, or taking the decisions out of individual applications and
moving them into centralized back-end systems with centralized rules, according
to
Ian
Glazer, a Garter analyst who wrote about the acquisition on his blog.
Instead of building the logic to handle security individually
inside each application and having to manage security policies separately,
externalizing authorization means a single platform will be in charge of
managing all the policies and rules. With Bitkoo's technology, Quest has the
opportunity to "bring externalized authorization to the masses,"
Glazer said, noting that protecting the data in SharePoint would be a good
first step.
Acquiring Bitkoo made a lot of sense since the company was a
"leader in the space" and had a healthy customer base, Sander said.
He noted that Bitkoo's technology was based on Microsoft .NET framework, which meant
it would be much easier to integrate with Quest's own products, as well as use
its plug-ins for Windows-centric platforms such as Sharepoint.
When someone wants to access an application, generally the
first question is "Who are you?" Sander said. Bitkoo's technology
asks a similar question, "What are you allowed to do?" in order to
figure what the person can do, according to Sander. Many organizations rely on
role-based systems that defined what the user, once authenticated, can access,
but with Bitkoo, they now have an enforcement capability, he said. Not only can
the system say what the user can access, it can also actively stop the user
from going ahead and trying to get into an unauthorized space.
"Quest has chosen to move forward with BitKoo as our 'big
bet' in the authorization market,"
Jackson
Shaw, senior director of product management at Quest Software, wrote on his
blog.
Quest has acquired several identity and access management
companies in recent years, including Volcker Informatik for provisioning and
access governance, Symlabs for virtual directory services, Vintela for Linux
and Unix authentication and integration, and e-DMZ for privileged user and
account management tools.
It would be interesting to see if Quest would tie Keystone
with the IAG capabilities acquired from Voelker, Glazer noted.
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