Entrust clouds up ID management into a portal

As an add-on to its plans to pull security services together under a cloud-delivered umbrella, identity management specialist, Entrust, is moving to build a partner portal service that is aimed at making it a focal point for delivering security services to a channel of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and applications and services resellers.

According to Jason Jackson, Entrust’s International Sales Director, there is an opportunity for the company to create this new market opportunity because its larger competitors do not offer a portal approach to allow users to build consolidation of their security services, while the smaller ones cannot offer the spread of services that the customers require.

“It is possible that some of those smaller suppliers can  offer individual pieces of a security suite that are very good,” Jackson said, “but the problem for the customer then is having to engineer those individual components into a coherent, easily managed security environment. That is what we see as the next big piece in the marketplace, CSPs and resellers adding comprehensive security capabilities to the range of applications and services they are aggregating together.”

Part of Jackson’s job since joining Entrust in January is to identify partners for this growing channel. His eye is currently focusing on large Microsoft partners as well as CSPs in this early stage of development. These are the businesses that he feels can start working quickly with an out-of-the-box solution, which is one of the reasons the company has packaged up its services as a cloud deliverable `box’, the Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services, which consolidates the management of digital identities, SSL certificates and credentials via a single solution platform.

“With the substantial increase in connected devices and distributed computing, strong identity solutions are more important than ever as a critical security layer,” said David Wagner, president of Entrust. “Organisations often deploy separate, disparate point solutions that result in difficult, time-consuming and expensive deployment and management. By consolidating identity management in the cloud, the Entrust solution helps reduce expenses, deployment challenges and management headaches that stem from legacy security solutions and techniques.”

Now part of Datacard Group, Entrust is consolidating its most popular certificate and credentialing solutions under the Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services portfolio. This transformation empowers users with a unified management console that provides a new level of visibility, ease of use and scalability.

The package introduces a more integrated product offering based on three existing components, and two new ones. The existing ones are  Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services SSL, formerly known as Entrust Certificate Management Service; Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Discovery, formerly just Entrust Discovery; and Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Device Certificates.

The two new components are Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Smart Credentials, which is expected later in 2014, and Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services PKI, formerly branded as Entrust Managed Services PKI, which is also expected later in 2014.
 
The infrastructure that powers Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services PKI is housed in established secure facilities, features a highly available and fully redundant framework with intelligent monitoring, and robust data backup and exceptional disaster recovery. Certain offerings of certificate-related services are trusted by and cross-certified with the U.S. Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA).

The new cloud-based smart credential solution enables organisations to produce and manage a single unified identity credential for each person associated with an enterprise, government agency or citizen population — all delivered via Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services.

Entrust’s cloud-based management console is leveraged to enroll identities, activate credentials, provision identities to mobile devices, handle day-to-day management, print credentials and even mail smartcards or USB tokens to end-users.