CA announces new additions to its arsenal of cloud security solutions

CA World - CA Technologies announced two new identity and access management (IAM) cloud security services that expand its portfolio of IAM as a service solutions.

Gary Lawrence, MD of CA Southern Africa, says these services mark another step in the company's strategy to help customers use and provide cloud and traditional business services that enable IT to be more agile and operate at the speed the business demands.

“The new cloud solutions, CA IdentityMinder as a service and FedMinder as a service, join the company's existing advanced authentication services as part of the new CA CloudMinder family of IAM cloud solutions,” says Lawrence.

Mark Diodati, research vice-president at Gartner, says organisations are moving their applications to the cloud for cost reduction, for simplicity, and to better meet the rapidly changing demands of the business.

“While organisations strive 'to do more with less', they are discovering that moving to the cloud can provide greater capabilities in an era of flat IT budgets. Organisations are leveraging identity management as a service (IDaaS) offerings - turnkey, productised capabilities that can be run on-premises or in a hosted, multi-tenant environment - to reduce costs, accommodate the rapidly changing demands of the business, and better focus on organisational priorities,” says Diodati.

CA IdentityMinder as a service and CA FedMinder as a service offer all the benefits of a cloud deployment model, including elasticity to expand or contract service support as needed, shorter deployment cycles and cost-savings as a result of reduced IT administration.

“As the IT environment shifts to include cloud applications and services alongside traditional on-premise applications, identity and access management also must shift,” says Lawrence.

”The hybrid application environment adds a level of complexity that IT must manage and secure in a way that balances the risk/reward scenario for the organisation. That balance may require both on-premise deployments of IAM solutions and cloud-delivered IAM security services. We are providing our proven IAM solutions the way the customers tell us they want them - either on-premise, as a service or a mix of both,” he notes.

The new services provide customers several key capabilities for increasing security and improving operational efficiencies. They offer integration with CA AuthMinder as a service, empowering customers to add strong authentication for accessing CA IdentityMinder as a service and CA FedMinder as a service. This supplements standard username and password authentication. In addition, the services support customisation of the Web user interface to help customers meet their organisational requirements, and ease end-user adoption and training.