"We expect customers will maintain a hybrid of on-premises and cloud-based offerings," says Liberti. CA will be seeking to facilitate this dual-pronged approach. But for those who want to go full cloud for the CA managed service, that will be possible through CA assisting in synchronizing the enterprise identity repositories, such as Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP, to integrate with CA's IdentityMinder SaaS in the cloud. Two CA data centers in the U.S. will be part of the hosting service.
"It's fully automated when we establish the connection with the directory in order to provision the user," Liberti says. The IT manager will be able to carry out the same type of provisioning of users and obtain reporting through the SaaS portal. The pricing model is expected to be per user per month per application.
Last year CA extended its Identity Manager product by giving it a way to exert the same credentialing and authorization in the Salesforce.com and Google apps environments as it might internally on premises. CA will continue to provide Identity Manager for on-premises use even as it widens choices for identity management in the cloud.
