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CA Technologies announced an update to its CA Identity Suite on November 30, providing enterprises with new deployment, integration and security capabilities. The new CA Identity Suite version 14 release benefits from recent acquisitions made by CA.
“You need to have a model for how to ensure the appropriate access regardless of where the using is coming from or where the resources are located,” Nick Nikols, SVP and Cybersecurity Business CTO at CA Technologies, told eWEEK. “Identity isn’t about who you are, it’s about what you do.”
Nikols explained that the CA Identity Suite provides capabilities for access governance as well as enforcement features. He added that a goal of the new release is to simplify access governance with a user interface that is easier for business decision makers to use.
“We have also simplified how fast the CA Identity Suite can be be deployed,” Nikols said.
In the past, Nikols noted that prior versions of Identity Suite would often involve the use of professional services with consulting in order to facilitate deployment. Nikols said that now, with the new release, even a high-availability configuration can be deployed rapidly. At the Gartner IAM (Identity and Access Management) conference on December 1, Nikols said that CA demonstrated on-stage how it was able to deliver a two-server deployment of Identity Suite within eight minutes.
Once the identity suite is deployed on servers, there is still a need for policy configuration, which is where another new enhancement comes in. Nikols explained that with the new Identity Suite release, there are now pre-packaged policy configurations for the most common use-cases. Policy configurations can now also be shared within an organization or community.
“We’ve turned the roll-out of Identity Suite from being a custom bespoke engagement which was time consuming, to something that can be deployed quickly and operational in short order,” Nikols said.
Some of the new capabilities in the updated Identity Suite benefit from recent CA Technologies acquisitions. Among those acquisitions was one on June 8, 2015 of privately-held intelligent identity manager IdMlogic. Nikols said that some of the capabilities in the new release, including the ability to deliver the Identity Suite as a virtual appliance, were gained from IdMlogic.
The issue of maintaining a secure identity in a modern distributed enterprise is a non-trivial task. In addition to Microsoft’s Active Directory which is widely used, Nikol noted that there are many identity repositories that are being used including other enterprise Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories. He added that applications generally maintain their own identity repositories and authorization models.
“Federation facilitates the single sign on between these environments, but it has done little to simplify the management of all these copies of identities in each of these repositories,” Nikols said. “CA Identity Suite is focused on orchestrating the management of all of these copies—making sure that their state is current and accurate, and that the proper entitlement settings are maintained within each of the applications’ own authorization models.”
“This makes it possible to have consistent information as well as authorization behavior established and maintained across these distributed environments,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist