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Idaptive announced its Next-Gen Access Cloud on Feb. 7, providing organizations with a unified approach for Identity and Access Management (IAM) in the cloud and on-premises.
The Next-Gen Access Cloud integrates multiple components including single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and user behavior analytics (UBA) to help organizations with access requirements. The new release is the first major effort from Idaptive since the company was spun out from its parent Centrify at the end of 2018.
“We’re basically doing all the single sign-on, endpoint management, multi factor authentication and everything related to allowing access for users into systems,” Danny Kibel, CEO of Idaptive, told eWEEK. “These could be any type of users, employees, business partners, vendors, contractors, all the way through into customers trying to gain access to company resources.”
Centrify is a leading vendor in the privileged access management (PAM) and was also active in the identity and access management market. Kibel said that Centrify had been successful in both areas, but in 2018 the decision was made to separate the two businesses into two companies. Kibel said the main premise around the split was to enable better focus for each of the lines of business.
Next-Gen Access Cloud
Idaptive’s Next-Gen Access cloud is being positioned by the company as a stand-alone offering in the IAM space. Corey Williams, vice president of strategy for Idaptive, commented that the new company’s ability to focus just on IAM is reflected in the offering’s ability to meet the needs of different types of organizations. By bringing multiple capabilities together in the same platform, Idaptive is looking to reduce the friction for organizations to adopt the different features. For example, Williams said that multi-factor authentication is a well-known best practice, but is often challenging for organizations to properly implement as it can be disconnected from other IAM services.
“All the aspects of managing access to applications on-premises or in the cloud, or on a mobile device, access to endpoints or to the network—all of that is managed through the same set of policies and administrative interfaces,” Williams said.
A key challenge for many organizations is also having IAM controls in place for custom-built applications. Williams explained that Idaptive can be used for custom applications as well, serving as a platform for developers to adopt best practices and centralized management around identity and access, rather than building a one-off for every one of their projects.
CASB
When considering access to cloud applications, the term Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) inevitably comes up. CASB is a technology that helps bridge on-premises identity with cloud applications. Williams emphasized that the Next-Gen Access Cloud is not a CASB technology; rather, he noted that Idaptive partners with CASB vendors.
Williams explained that the access control features that Idaptive provides, including SSO and MFA, are foundational elements that help enable CASB platforms. CASB technologies typically are used at the application level with fine-grained access control, he said.
“We tend to control the access to the front door of applications and provisioning users into the right places within those applications,” Williams said. “But we don’t get into the data level where we can control which objects or individual elements of the application that can be accessed. That’s where CASB come into play.”
What’s Next
From a business perspective, Kibel sees a large opportunity for his company to help organizations migrate to next-generation access control.
“We will continue to evolve our solution to create the best frictionless yet secure solution for our customers to enable them to deploy new architectures and digitally transform their businesses,” Kibel said.
Idaptive will be evolving its technologies both with organic in-house development as well via partnerships and strategic acquisitions. Kibel noted that Idaptive is part of private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which provides the company with the backing it needs to grow.
“Being part of Thoma Bravo, which is the largest private equity firm in the security space, gives us a lot of weight in terms of ability to actually enhance the business through inorganic growth,” Kibel said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.