Toronto-based Blockade System Corp. recently unveiled of suite of products designed to help enterprises reduce their costs of delivering electronic services to employees, business partners and customers.
The ManageID solution suite – Selfserv, Syncserv, and Identiserv – is an identity management and provisioning solution for large distributed IT environments with disparate operating systems, data stores and applications servicing thousands of users.
Identiserv provides system administrators the ability to delegate the process of provisioning and deprovisioning users to IT and non-IT personnel who act as user identity authorities – typically application service provider (ASP) business managers, security and HR personnel. The Web-based Selfserv product allows administrators to delegate identity management and provisioning tasks to end-users.
Syncserv handles synchronization of user identity changes in real time, across a wide spectrum of operating systems, platforms and applications, Blockade said, adding that this includes changes to a user’s password and state.
What ManageID does is automate the task of managing identities during the entire lifecycle all the way from registration to the dissolution of the identities, said Rosa Caputo, business development officer at Blockade.
The suite is designed to work across heterogeneous environments, Caputo said. “Whatever platform an organization brings in typically has its own identity repository. So you can manage user IDs and passwords that control the access to services that are available,” Caputo said. “ManageID automates the management of identities across all of these platforms so it doesn’t require you to have only one – it will take whatever you have and be able to manage…through the use of centralized policies that an organization establishes,” Caputo added.
Caputo noted the solution also offers distributed administration, allowing distributed entities to administer user IDs and passwords on systems located in other departments or offices.
Faced with the challenge of managing user identities within a large IT environment, end user Ed Cicardo, director of data security at ADP Brokerage Services Group in Jersey City, N.J., said the distributed management feature fit the company needs. The service bureau needed a flexible and open-ended solution such as Blockade, Cicardo said.
“It also has a nice utility toolkit that allows me to interface from a distributed environment and enables me to do authentication – it’s probably going to be a key player in our portal environment that we are presently building,” Cicardo said.
A recent study by Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. suggested that enterprises are placing more emphasis on ROI when it comes to enterprise and portal security solutions. The report, User Provisioning in Transaction Incident Management, revealed that by 2005, 60 per cent of Global 2000 enterprises will have implemented user provisioning systems to manage their internal and external user access requirements for Web and non-Web applications. Using solutions such as the ManageID solution can translate into annual savings of between US$275,000 to almost US$2 Million for 5,000 users, Gartner said.
Blockade’s ManageID solution suite is available now, with pricing based on number of users. Blockade Systems Corp. can be found at http://www.blockade.com.