Today's enterprise is more complex than ever before. The pressure on Information Technology departments to manage their technology resources to meet the current organizational needs all the while scaling to meet its future needs is tremendous.

A question we get almost daily is, "Can your software manage Live@edu and Google Apps accounts?" The short answer is - ABSOLUTELY!

At it’s core, Data Synchronization System (DSS) is a data management tool. This tool helps us to tackle various use-cases, the most common being, Identity Management. In addition to IDM, we use DSS on a regular basis to build Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Solutions as well as Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) Solutions. Another excellent use for DSS is in building Data Virtualization Solutions.

Not a day goes by that we don't have a conversation with a customer about some service they want to connect to that exists in the "cloud". There are numerous ways to handle the authentication for those services and there is increasing interest in the use of SAML for this purpose.

Protection of your organization’s data assets is critical to ensuring your competitive edge as well as to fulfilling your fiduciary responsibility. Failure to implement systems to guarantee the enforcement of company policies for data access can cause serious legal troubles and shake the confidence of your customers.

The list of regulatory and other mandates that require some level of Identity Management is ever growing. Having a documented process and then relying on people to follow those processes is not enough to ensure compliance to these mandates. The only real solution to mitigate process breach is to implement systems to guarantee access controls.

As we have the privilege of talking to customers about their Identity Management needs, one of the requests that comes up over and over again is around the delegation of Account Management.

We work with organizations every day that consume a number of their services from “the cloud”. For many commercial and government customers these are services like Google Apps or Zendesk. For education customers, we see a lot of Live@EDU, Google Apps and Raptor V-Soft but the list of service providers is endless.

I have been around Information Technology for 20 years and managing Privileged User Access has always been a challenge.

The strength of user passwords sets the bar for the strength of an organization's defenses against "bad guys" gaining access to valuable organizational resources. For that reason alone, it is of paramount importance that a best practice password policy is implemented and enforced.