Centrify takes unified identity management into the cloud and out to mobile devices

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Linda Musthaler.

In the 2013 version of the annual Gartner Executive Program survey, more than 2,000 CIOs in 41 countries identified their top 10 technology priorities for the year. The survey showed that analytics and business intelligence ranks No.1, with mobile technologies and cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) coming in at Nos. 2 and 3. CIOs are looking to these digital technologies to help their companies achieve business results.

While the focus of these technologies is on how to use them to boost business, the underlying IT concerns are still there. How will we secure our data on mobile devices and in the cloud? How will we know who is using our resources? How can we manage these diverse technologies effectively and efficiently? They are the same questions companies ask themselves over and over again as they grapple with increasingly complex and disparate infrastructures and a multitude of mobile devices accessing applications on-premise and in the cloud…

Many IT professionals believe that good resource management begins with the identity of the user and the use of consistent policies to allow the appropriate access to resources. This can be a real challenge in a homogeneous environment that is growing more diverse every day. It used to be that companies had to manage identities and access privileges across Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac environments. To that we now add iOS, Android and other mobile platforms, as well as SaaS applications that are purely in the cloud. It’s a nightmare for end users to remember all of their usernames and passwords, and it’s a nightmare for the IT department to know who is accessing what, from where…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/techexec/2013/080213-best-practices.html