Security management, SaaS headline CAWorld

LAS VEGAS - With IT managers increasingly outsourcing their key infrastructure to third-party service providers, security and risk management is getting lost in the shuffle, according to CA Inc.

To address this, the company announced the release of two new CA Identity and Access Management (IAM) upgrades designed to strengthen security for external IT services.

During Monday’s sessions at CAWorld 2008 in Las Vegas, nearly every CA executive stressed the need for IT to adapt to the sputtering economy and reduce unnecessary spending wherever possible. With capital budgets for new IT projects at a complete standstill in many organizations, CA argued that companies have almost no choice but to move some IT services to a hosted, pay-as-you-go model.

Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice-president and GM of security management at CA, said that as individual business units such as marketing, HR and sales continue to go around IT and sign-up with their own Web-based consulting services, the need to secure and authenticate outgoing data is crucial.

“Salesforce.com is not a trivial thing to roll out,” he said. “Data is leaving your environment and you can’t keep up with it.”

The latest additions to CA’s IAM product portfolio are CA’s Federation Manager product, designed to simplify the deployment of federated partnerships, and CA’s SOA Security Manager, a policy-based administration tool that secures access to services by inspecting the content in XML messages.

“People are very immature in this space,” Hansen said. “About five or six years ago, most companies had their entire application portfolio inside their firewalls. Now, more apps are outside and everything requires a level of authentication.”

Most companies, he added, don’t have a process for how to manage security as they roll out new third-party applications and services.

Both products will be generally available next month.

Adnan Amjad, a security and privacy services partner at Deloitte, said that CA is addressing a big gap in the security market and sees a significant opportunity for the company.