Start-up adds SSO to cloud integration platform

Start-up Symplified on Monday said it would release in early October a single sign-on module for its identity integration platform designed to help companies securely connect their corporate infrastructure to cloud-based computing services.

Symplified’s Keychain lets companies use their internal authentication, user account creation and provisioning systems to deploy an SSO hub that securely extends to online applications and services.

The infrastructure platform, which is available as on-premises software or as a hosted service, is built on the Symplified Identity Router, which is designed to hide the complexity of the integrations.

“On the back end, companies want SSO for ease of use, but also want it for monitoring utilization, to determine which services to renew or expand, and to control leakage in terms of end-users who may leave the company,” says Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies. Kaplan says IT is putting a greater focus on getting a handle on online services that have entered their computing landscape in an ad-hoc fashion.

“IT is beyond the point of trying to combat [software-as-a-service] and cloud computing. They have discovered that it works and are even starting to adopt it for their own purposes and Symplified is an example of that,” he says.

Symplified’s SinglePoint Studio interface to the Identity Router gives administrators an iTunes-like selector for picking online services they wish to integrate with their directory-based or other user authentication and/or access policy data.

The router, unveiled in July, is a self-contained box that can run on the network or in a company’s DMZ and features a hardened Linux-based operating system. It has no external IP address, a feature that lets it hide from attackers.

The same router is used as the foundation for Symplified’s hosted service. The company can remotely push upgrades and updates to the router and manage the box.

The router comes in three flavors: the GTX model that scales to 2 million identities, the GT that scales to 200,000 and the GTV that scales to 100,000.

The Keychain “module” adds the SSO element to the router’s capabilities. Keychain also provides SSO internally for SAP-based portals, and supports the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and HTTP-based federation, which employs a log-on form and passes credentials to online applications via SSL.

All of that process, however, is hidden from users and administrators. Keystone provides the pre-built plumbing and logic. In its first release, the platform supports Salesforce, Google Apps, Concur, Workday, WebEx, NetSuite and ADP. Symplified also can build connectors for other services.

“It is one of those bits of gory plumbing,” says Eric Olden, CEO of Symplified. “It’s not really federation; it is more of those real-work type scenarios.” Olden says Symplified found that many online services do not support SAML so it had to come up with a way to make the connection between companies and the services they buy.

Keychain is slated to ship Oct. 1 and is priced at $2,500 per month for three connections to online services.