CA Technologies on Wednesday announced new product, customer and partner proof points of how its identity and access management (IAM) technology supports use of cloud applications by enhancing security, helping to ease compliance efforts, and automating processes for improved operational efficiencies in managing the IT supply chain.

The announcement includes the availability of new CA Identity Manager capabilities that extend identity management to cloud applications; it highlights how a customer has leveraged the CA SiteMinder portfolio to control access to its SaaS applications; and it features how CA Technologies is providing IAM as a service from the cloud. It also includes technology integration to streamline Identity Governance processes, and help ensure security policies are followed, and access and entitlements are appropriately granted and certified.

"Our goal is to help organizations leverage the business value of cloud computing as part of their broader, dynamic IT service supply chain. From a security and IAM perspective, we have a three-pronged approach to executing that strategy," said Bill Mann, senior vice president of Strategy for CA Technologies Security business. "We enable enterprises to extend their existing on-premise IAM systems to encompass cloud applications and services. We provide IAM for cloud providers to secure their services - whether private, public, or hybrid; and we enable IAM services from the cloud."

Identity and Access Management To, For and From the Cloud

• To the cloud: Regardless of whether an application resides within the enterprise or is hosted in the cloud, managing the identities and controlling the access of users to key resources is a critical function for IT organizations that face increasing pressure to cut operating costs while still enabling compliance and productivity. CA Technologies is focused on delivering a single identity management system to manage identities for applications internal to the enterprise and external in the cloud.

CA Identity Manager now supports user provisioning to Google Apps(TM), Google's suite of communication and collaboration tools which includes Gmail and Google Docs, available to businesses, schools, governments and non-profits. Organizations now can automate identity management functions, such as role-based user provisioning and de-provisioning, and self-service access requests, to deliver a single, automated system for managing identities for Google Apps in the cloud, as well as existing in-house applications.

This support for Google Apps follows the release in March of a similar capability for salesforce.com's enterprise cloud computing platform, Force.com, and applications including Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2 and Salesforce Chatter.

The new capabilities added to CA Identity Manager for Google Apps and salesforce.com's enterprise cloud computing offerings are available today. The technology is part of the base code for CA Identity Manager and is available at no additional charge to existing CA Identity Manager customers.

• For the cloud: Existing IAM solutions from CA Technologies help control users, their access and how they can use information in private, public or hybrid cloud environments. They help deliver the same level of security found within the enterprise addressing needs that include virtualization security, compliance, policy management and more.