November 14, 2011, 3:25 PM — CA Technologies has gotten its feet wet with cloud-based security before, but now the company is moving further in with a package of cloud based identity and access control services.
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To that end, CA today announced the CloudMinder portfolio of cloud-based services tied to user management and service provisioning, access, reporting, single-sign-on and standards-based federation linked to policies for identity-provider control.
These are the kind of features IT managers have at hand with CA's on-premises product called identity Manager. But for the first time, CA will offer customers identity and access management as purely cloud-based services. One is called CA IdentityMinder as-a-Service for provisioning both on-premises and cloud services and applications. The second is CA FedMinder as-a-Service for single-sign-on across domains.
CA's vice president of security, Lina Liberti, says competition is starting to build in what is still a new area of cloud-based identity management and security-as-a-service (SaaS) . She said CA is going to be there with the IdentityMinder and FedMinder SaaS offerings in the first quarter of next year. "There will be nothing on premise at all with this," she points out. The announcement was made at the annual CA World conference today.
Symantec, Oracle, IBM and a slew of small providers, such as Okta, Ping and Symplified, are either already in the identity-management SaaS race or are expected to get in soon.
There could be cost-savings and speed of deployment associated with cloud-based security, and while CA expects to see at least some of its customers adopt the new SaaS-based approach to identity management, Liberti indicated the likelihood is that a hybrid approach is going to be in force for some time. She noted enterprises are likely to try SaaS but don't necessarily plan to discard their on-premises Identity Manager deployments.
