Enterprise security and authentication specialist Centrify announced that its Identity Service offering now supports secure collaboration through federation for business partners and single sign-on (SSO) for end customers.
Partner identity management is now delivered through identity federation support with other leading identity providers, making it easier for organizations to share identity information.
To further enable customer identity management, Centrify also offers social identity support and SSO support for OpenID Connect applications, making it possible for customers to log in to an enterprise’s customer-facing applications.
“Businesses today are more collaborative then ever as companies frequently partner with other companies,” Jeff Friedsam, director of product management at Centrify, told eWEEK. “Rather than building all things in-house, companies leverage a large ecosystem of suppliers, distributors and vendors. These companies work together effectively with trust, communication and separation of responsibilities.”
These partners, Friedsam explained, need access to the same resources, including software and databases, which are often managed by one of the partners.
“It’s important for that partner to be able to make those resources easily and securely accessible to their partners without having to manage the user identities of the individual users,” he said.
Centrify’s Business-to-Business (B2B) support allows organizations to share applications with their business partners without having to manage partner identities.
With Centrify, employees at partner organizations can authenticate through their own identity provider for single sign-on to shared applications through an Identity Service cloud tenant.
“We would like to see companies get rid of username and passwords entirely, as many government agencies and security-conscious enterprises have already done,” Friedsam said. “We know that compromised credentials are the No. 1 attack vector for data breaches, so the more able an organization is to reduce, or eliminate, the use of these credentials, the better served they will be in protecting their value.”
In addition, the company’s Business-to-Customer (B2C) support lets consumer-facing companies focus on building Websites and services, while offloading the burden of customer identity management to Centrify.
“Centrify realized early on that as software moved to the cloud, the more that software would be accessed from mobile devices,” Friedsam said. “For this reason, Centrify built its Identity as a Service with a fully featured, fully integrated EMM and MFA solution from day one. We did this because we knew that the only way to make good decisions about authentication and access to a company’s critical resources was to have a good understanding of the security of the devices from which those resources were being accessed.”
