Cloud identity provider Symplified Tuesday added provisioning and management capabilities to its service platform that lets users create a bridge between their in-house directories and cloud-based applications.
The company introduced the Symplified Cloud Identity Manager (CIM), which works with corporate directories and online applications to provide account creation, provisioning, modification and de-provisioning features.
This first edition of CIM integrates with the Force.com application platform run by Salesforce.com. Companies can store user data on Force.com and access it via Symplified's identity platform and combine it with internal user data. Symplified plans to support other cloud-based application platforms, including Amazon's EC2.
CIM lets administrators manage user account data stored with cloud applications just like they manage users in their directories. Users also can integrate internal and cloud-based user data to create specific access controls that may combine authentication attributes from a corporate directory with personalization features stored in a cloud-based application.
Companies also can use CIM as a single console to manage internal user account information and partner data that is stored with the cloud-based application. That feature means users aren't forced to manage partner data on their internal directories.
"With the interface inside our product, Active Directory and Salesforce.com look identical in terms of how you use them for authentication, access control and personalization," says Eric Olden, co-founder and CEO of Symplified.
One of the dirty little secrets of moving critical applications to the cloud is how do companies apply the access controls, provisioning, auditing and compliance chores they perform internally.
Symplified is attempting to solve that problem with CIM, which is an add-on to its SinglePoint Cloud security platform, a sort of middleware that provides Web single-sign-on, access control, auditing and identity virtualization.
The Simplified identity add-on has three components.
The SinglePoint Identity Manager lets Salesforce.com serve as a hosted user repository for single sign-on, authentication, access control policies and Web personalization.
CIM provides a provisioning interface for users (including self-service password reset), and administrators (including policy management and configuration changes). And the Cloud Provisioning Gateway taps the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) to manage user identity in cloud applications.
CIM can integrate with provisioning systems from Oracle, CA, Quest, Identropy and Sun.
CIM is priced per user, but the company has not set pricing and only will say it will be in line with its other per user pricing, which ranges from $1 to $3 per month.