ForgeRock Releases Breakthrough Identity Bridge for Cloud Service Providers

Service providers can now synchronize cloud and traditional enterprise identity infrastructures and accelerate cloud adoption with the ForgeRock identity bridge, a new customizable on-premises software appliance

SAN FRANCISCO – (BUSINESS WIRE July 30, 2013) – ForgeRock Inc., the leading open platform provider of identity and access management (IAM) security solutions, today announced the ForgeRock Bridge Service Provider Edition (SPE), a new customizable on-premises appliance offered to cloud service providers to seamlessly integrate the user identities of their enterprise customers with the cloud services they offer.

Built on ForgeRock’s Open Identity Stack, ForgeRock Bridge SPE accelerates cloud service adoption by automating the addition of new users and streamlining the onboarding process. ForgeRock Bridge SPE accomplishes this by providing user provisioning to create new user accounts automatically, federated single sign-on to recognize users across company systems, and real-time synchronization of user identities, making end-to-end user management across enterprise, cloud, and mobile environments instantaneous.

Most companies have deployed IAM solutions designed for company-owned on-premises environments only, making it difficult for software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers offering hosted services to break into the market. SaaS providers today must have the infrastructure to bridge these on-premises environments to hosted services, giving savvy CIOs looking to save time, money, and effort the flexibility to outsource business applications to SaaS providers. Securely accessing this data off-premises and across hybrid environments has been notoriously difficult, with multiple logins, mismatched account data, and manual account adjustments necessary. ForgeRock Bridge SPE solves this problem by seamlessly aligning the various user identities needed to access company resources, and providing the airtight security to store them in a service provider’s cloud, worry-free.

“Enterprise identity stores and cloud identity stores are often treated as two mutually exclusive services that do not communicate, forcing organizations to spend double the time managing and aligning two disparate data sources,” said Peter Cummings, managing partner, KuppingerCole Analysts. “In the internet of things, to properly support the extended enterprise, it becomes increasingly critical to have the ability to tightly synchronize cloud identity infrastructures with traditional enterprise identity infrastructures. This is critical in order for cloud service providers to balance the demands of customers with the fears of CIOs and CSOs.”

Leveraging core services from ForgeRock’s OpenAM and OpenIDM products, and designed using the latest identity standards including SAML2 and OAuth2, ForgeRock Bridge SPE successfully connects enterprise and cloud identities through an incredibly robust, turnkey software appliance. Features of ForgeRock Bridge SPE include:

• User Provisioning Engine: Instantly adds and removes users automatically and on the fly.
• Federated Single Sign-On: Uses standards-based single sign-on (SAML) to automatically sign into partner applications — cloud, social, mobile and enterprise.
• Standards-based Authorization: Provides OAuth2 authorization for different types of applications, including enabling a transparent connection between cloud services, mobile devices, and enterprises.
• Identity and Active Directory Synchronization: Real-time synchronization of user accounts between enterprise and cloud services allows the instant addition or removal of users in enterprise, cloud, and/or Microsoft Active Directory.
• Auditing and Reporting: Supports compliance requirements with a complete audit feature to log and report user and group authentication data and federation events managed between the enterprise and cloud systems.

“In today’s increasingly mobile workforce, users need to have multiple identities that they can use across hybrid cloud environments, but IAM solutions are still tailored just to the traditional, on-premises, enterprise environment,” said Mike Ellis, CEO, ForgeRock. “In speaking to our customers and partners, we recognized these challenges and designed ForgeRock Bridge SPE to seamlessly, securely, and cost-effectively connect all customer user identities across cloud-based service environments. As a result, service providers eliminate the security risks facing today’s CIOs and CSOs, while meeting the needs of today’s ever-changing work environment.”

In the coming months, ForgeRock will announce ForgeRock Bridge Enterprise Edition designed for businesses with enterprise use cases in mind.