(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloud security company Symplified (www.symplified.com) has launched a unified Identity and Access Management solution for enterprises using the Amazon’s (aws.amazon.com) elastic compute cloud (or “EC2″) platform to run their applications in the cloud.
According to Symplified’s Monday announcement, Symplified Trust Cloud (www.thetrustcloud.com) enables organizations to meet US, EU, and country-specific compliance mandates for data governance, accelerate the implementation of SAML single sign-on federation, and to deploy IAM for their cloud resources in just days.
Bob Blakley, vice president and research director for IT industry research firm Burton Group (www.burtongroup.com), said that the lack of truly native cloud-based identity management solutions has held back organizations wishing to move applications to the cloud. “This has forced enterprises to choose either fragmented management of identity across multiple cloud application providers (with the inconvenience of multiple user logons) or an inefficient hybrid of cloud-hosted applications and on-premises identity management,” Blakley said in a statement. “The cloud’s promise won’t be realized until identity management can provide a single source of user administration, hosted in a cloud data center, supporting single sign on to multiple cloud applications by users whose accounts are managed in multiple cloud repositories.”
Symplified Trust Cloud is a turnkey unified IAM solution that provides access management, authentication, user provisioning and administration, single sign-on, federated SSO, and usage auditing for applications running on the Amazon EC2 platform. It uses a proven proxy architecture to solve the complex IAM challenges encountered when using Amazon EC2, such as integrating enterprise and cloud identity repositories to enforce security policies. It also provides a rich integration fabric to link on-premises infrastructure like Active Directory and ADFS 2.0 with SAML and cloud identity data from salesforce.com, Google, etc., with Amazon EC2 hosted applications.
To make audit and compliance reporting for EC2 applications possible, Symplified Trust Cloud maintains and centralizes comprehensive usage logs of all activity on the Amazon platform. And since it is colocated on EC2 and uses a proxy approach, Symplified Trust Cloud buffers direct access to applications and provides an additional layer of security. This loosely coupled architecture also eliminates dependencies between Symplified Trust Cloud and Amazon EC2′s infrastructure.
Symplified chief executive officer Eric Olden said the idea of the cloud as an operating system is becoming accepted by large and small enterprises, and Symplified’s Trust Cloud is designed for this new environment. “Symplified Trust Cloud provides a pre-integrated and easy to deploy security fabric that federates multiple clouds, bridges cloud applications and on-premises infrastructure using Amazon EC2 to deliver a level of performance, reliability, and geographic reach that enterprises could not attain on their own,” Olden said.
