eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Enterprise Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) provider Centrify announced plans to work with Google to deliver integrated identity and mobile management for Android for Work.
In addition to Android for Work, the company also delivers single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Chromebooks; shared account password management and auditing of privileged users for Google Compute Engine’s virtual servers, and enhanced user provisioning for Google Apps.
Centrify’s capabilities and Android for Work partnership let customers adopt multiple Google for Work products, including Android devices, Chromebooks, Google Compute Engine, and Google Apps for Work by providing an additional layer of security and management.
“Customers are asking that identity management and mobile device management should work as a unified service. If you look at what users do on devices, they use apps,” Shreyas Sadalgi, senior vice president of business development at Centrify, told eWEEK. “What defines a secure user in an app is their digital enterprise identity. You can do a good job of applying policies and managing, but how do you then tie that app to an identity, and how do you challenge that and ensure the device posture is in line with what’s required?”
Sadalgi said customers want a single policy framework that defines all that, which is why Centrify delivered this unified console and policy for Google.
“That’s what Centrify is providing for Google enterprise customers–a single console for managing the access rights of people, apps, and devices,” he said.
Integrated identity and mobile management enables IT to embrace Android devices in the workplace and support bring your own device (BYOD) programs.
With Centrify Identity Service, IT can unify device context, user identity and IT policy to help ensure that access to apps is granted only to authorized devices. From a single management console, IT can manage Android for Work profiles, provision corporate email and other apps and provide single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to apps deployed to the Android for Work profile.
Organizations can leverage their existing Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP to deploy Chromebooks to their workforce without synchronizing passwords to Google Apps.
Using Centrify Identity Service, workers can use their existing corporate identity to login to Chromebooks and access all the corporate apps they need, while IT can also implement additional security through multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies.
As organizations of all sizes continue to adopt Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), they need to secure, manage and audit access to cloud-based servers.
With Centrify Privilege Service, companies can simplify management of shared, privileged account passwords to secure administrative access to Google Compute Engine’s virtual servers.
“BYOD is changing and evolving to enable productivity and secure app usage for employees rather than being a stick to restrict and lock down the device,” Sadalgi said. “We are seeing more customers embrace the concept of work/play separation on their devices through native mobile OS platforms that are now providing it out of the box–Google’s Android for Work is a great example.”