In mid-May the US startup Symplified launched a new product called Trust Cloud.
Symplified is focused on cloud computing security, and specifically on identity access management (IAM).
The company offers Single Sign-On (SSO) products that can run on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service cloud platforms (Force.com, Google App Engine, Google Apps and many others are supported), as well as on-premises.
In its several forms, the flagship product, SinglePoint, allows Windows users to log into the multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that an enterprise uses just with their existing account credentials.
SinglePoint integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, mapping the Windows accounts and all the others owned by a firm to access online SaaS applications into a virtual LDAP directory.
Trust Cloud is the marketing name that Symplified assigned to the SinglePoint version for Amazon EC2.
The product can be used for two reasons:
- To have a hosted version of the IAM tier
Trust Cloud collects usage log of all activities performed inside EC2 and all the other cloud platforms supported. Multiple instances of the virtual appliances can run concurrently, so a company can deploy SinglePoint on different Amazon AWS data centers and meet specific regulatory requirements. In this case the product can avoid deploying its virtual directory service in countries with far reaching law enforcement statutes. - To offer SSO for those applications that an enterprise deploys in EC2 without modifying those applications to support federation
Besides out-of-the-box integration with multiple public cloud platforms, SinglePoint allows identity federation for custom and non-supported web applications through SAML 1.1, 2.0 and HTTP-FED 1.1.
Last but not least SinglePoint can leverage the Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2.0 specification that Amazon supports to federate directly with EC2.
