CA Technologies announced new identity and access management (IAM) solutions intended to enhance security, ease compliance efforts, and automate IT processes within cloud computing environments. The company released a new version of CA Identity Manager, which extends identity management to cloud applications, as well as leverage CA SiteMinder portfolio to control access to its SaaS applications.
Security issues - from an identity and access management perspective - are not too different for cloud access as they are for traditional web access, Lina Liberti, manager of the security customer solutions unit at CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "You still have to control who has access to what and control what they can do with the information they can access. We have solved that issue on premises, but in the cloud those issues are elevated. For example, in a public cloud you have concerns of multi-tenancy and who might be on your shared resource. You want to make sure that data protected and no other tenant can access your information."
While traditional web security and identity management tools address these requirements, but "may need some connecting code" for extending their capabilities to cloud environments. Liberti says. "Part of our strategy is to ensure that our customers' existing identity and access management solutions - which they are using for their on premise systems - can extend to support cloud services."
CA also says that CA Identity Manager now supports user provisioning to Google Apps, Google's suite of communication and collaboration tools which includes Gmail and Google Docs. Organizations now can automate identity management functions, such as role-based user provisioning and de-provisioning, and self-service access requests, to deliver a single, automated system for managing identities for Google Apps in the cloud, as well as existing in-house applications.
CA Identity Manager supports private cloud as well as public cloud access, Liberti says.
As CA Technologies continues to extend its IAM support to include cloud-based applications, it brings new benefits for organizations. For example, CA Role & Compliance Manager can certify user access both on-premise and cloud applications which helps meet audit requirements.
In addition, new integration between CA Role & Compliance Manager and CA Enterprise Log Manager is intended to simplify meeting compliance and audit requirements by streamlining Identity Governance processes to help ensure security policies are followed, and access and entitlements are appropriately granted and certified for both on premise and cloud applications.
Together, CA Role & Compliance Manager and CA Enterprise Log Manager provide a view of user access - highlighting potential policy violations - and a history of how frequently the user accessed the resource or data. CA Enterprise Log Manager provides the access history to help determine if access rights should be terminated. Although access may seem legitimate based on role, if a user hasn't accessed the resource in many months, the entitlement may not be necessary or appropriate.
For additional information, visit CA Technologies.