Symplified

Symplified is a cloud platform that allows small businesses to manage all the cloud-based services and applications employees are using, such as Google Apps, Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, and Concur. IT often struggle to track all the applications an employee was using and revoke access in a timely manner when the employee leaves. An identity access management (IAM) product such as Symplified would actually make the revocation process almost one-to-three because it tracks all user-related information.?

With this service, the IT department can control which employees have access to certain cloud applications, revoke access when they leave, and use Microsoft Active Directory to link cloud services with on-premise applications.?Symplified is also useful for knowing who is accessing which applications. Imagine being able to adjust license costs because IT can tell that 15 people in Marketing never logged into a service that costs the company on a per-user basis. Symplified really does simplify identity management for IT.

Cloud-based IAM tools let a company track employees' user names, passwords, and permissions for various applications. When the employee leaves the company, the IT department just needs to remove that profile, all accounts that employee had on various services are immediately revoked. IT departments can also turn on single sign-on to streamline the login process as well as enforce internal security policies, such as password strength, on external services.

Several vendors are trying to solve the problem of knowing what services employees are using, including Okta, Ping Identity, Symantec, Cisco, RSA, SecureAuth and, of course, Symplified. Symplified has customers in various sectors of the industry, including health care, financial services, manufacturing and telecommunications.

Pricing-wise, Symplified ONE follows the cloud model, allowing the business to pay only for the employees actually being managed. Pricing varies on number of users being licensed, ranging from $1 to $8 per user?though Symplified's pricing is flexible and can be adjusted for deployment type.

Getting Started
Symplified is available as a hosted offering. Businesses interested in the Symplified service but not comfortable with the cloud platform can opt to install an "identity router" locally within their own data center. On the flip side, cloud-happy businesses using Amazon EC2 can select the available Symplified image. For this review, I stuck with the hosted platform, and Symplified worked with me to create an environment linked to a few services.

In the end, I tried out four different "roles" on the platform: the IT administrator controlling the platform and security policies, two end users from different departments, in this case Sales and Marketing, and a senior level user such as a vice-president who would have more account privileges. The linked applications in my test were Box.net, Jive, Google Apps, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Taleo.

Connecting Applications with Users
Symplified supports both SAML and non-SAML applications. The Security Assertion Markup Language is an XML-based protocol for exchanging authentication and authorization data, but many Web applications don't have it enabled. The company has a pre-built "Trust Fabric" which contains connectors to hundreds of popular SAML applications such as Google Apps, Salesforce, Taleo. There are connectors that would work with custom on-premise apps built with Java, .NET, Ruby on Rails, and other Web architectures, as well.

Non-SAML applications, such as Box.com, are added to the platform by using a one-time keychain to track user credentials.?If a cloud application happens to not be in the Trust Fabric, Symplified said customers can use the Trust Connector tool to set up a single-signon connection for that application.

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