Cloud-computing consultancy Paradyne will offer its customers cloud identity and access management (IAM) tools from Centrify, giving that company’s cloud-based single sign-on (SSO) technology a big leg up in a local market where cloud-based services are rapidly gaining enterprise legitimacy.
The need to manage access credentials for cloud-based applications like Microsoft Office 365, in which Paradyne specialises, has become front of mind as users increasingly adopt cloud-based services that have traditionally managed user authentication completely separately to existing directory services.
Centrify’s Unified Identity Services product set – including its core Centrify Cloud Service platform and Centrify for Mobile and Centrify for SaaS offerings – has been designed to address this gap by automating the management of access credentials for cloud services. Centrify claims that its tools support over 1000 applications including Office 365, Salesforce.com, Webex, Concur, Dropbox, Box, Zendesk, Marketo and others.
The SaaS capabilities build on existing user-authentication controls for mobile devices, which received a shot in the arm when Centrify – whose business has for years revolved around on-premise authentication, Active Directory bridging and the like – partnered with Samsung to manage credentials on the mobile giant’s KNOX enterprise-security platform.
Centrify’s agreement with Paradyne “was a perfect choice for us in that they do a lot of Office 365,” APAC regional director Matt Ramsay told CSO Australia. “As we look into the Australian market and in other parts of Asia, we really needed to bring on more partners that were focused on cloud only.”
The Paradyne relationship was only signed last week but has already connected Centrify with “a couple of customers”, Ramsay said, with others in the pipeline. This, he said, reflects the increasing demand for unified IAM solutions that can seamlessly extend from on-premise directory-services setups to cloud-based services and bring your own device (BYOD) mobile strategies.
“Retaining your on-premise Active Directory is almost like keeping your secret sauce in-house,” Ramsay explained. “Having applications in the cloud is another cog in the wheel, and this lets that be extended to enterprise customers that want to retain their AD on premise. Since you can’t really decouple BYOD from cloud-based applications, this allows all cloud applications and mobile devices to be managed.”
Paradyne managing director Loryan Strant saw the Centrify partnership as a way of giving customers a more streamlined way to leverage their existing identity infrastructure,” he said in a statement.
“This allows Centrify customers to centrally manage authentication access, control, privilege management, policy enforcement together with auditing not only for cloud but also on-premises systems. We are very positive about delivering great value for customers through this new partnership.”
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