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Thursday, October 7, 2010

Cloud SSO heating up

In the early part of this decade, SSO vendors (Oblix, Netegrity, Tivoli, etc.) provided solution that made life simple and brought efficiencies for both employees and IT by eliminating the need to remember and maintain/reset tens if not hundreds of username/password combinations that allowed employees to access internal applications needed for their job.

In the next wave, these SSO solutions moved into partner and consumer facing applications where federation was brought in to mediate between different security systems leading to popularization of SAML standard.

Fast forward to now - As new set of applications get delivered as SaaS, SSO had to catch-up with this new deployment model, and new products/solutions are emerging to solve these challenges.

  • TriCipher (acquired by VmWare) - VmWare saw this need early on as it tries to deliver the vCloud platform. This piece may also become the security mediator between vCloud deployments and external SaaS/cloud offerings. Will have to watch what VmWare does with it.
  • PingIdentity - The PingFederate solution addresses this need. PingIdentity has been a pioneer in the SAML federation space.
  • Symplified - Started by ex-PingIdentity folks, it has quickly earned a name for itself in this space.
  • Vordel - It's Cloud Service Broker provides solution in this space.
  • Citrix OpenCloud Access - This is the latest addition to this space, available as an optional module for Citrix Netscaler. Announced yesterday at Citrix Synergy (Citrix's annual user conference), this should also help Citrix implicitly sell more of it's GoToMeeting product line.
As you can see the market for Cloud SSO is heating up ...