EMC Acquires Aveksa For Identity Management, Access Governance

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Waltham, Mass.-based Aveksa provides single sign-on, user provisioning and other access governance capabilities for on-premises and cloud-based services. The company will operate within RSA's Identity Trust Management product group and be integrated with RSA's adaptive authentication strategy for enforcing identity and access policies.

If the company is well integrated with RSA's current portfolio, it could provide RSA with a fully functional identity and access management suite, said Andras Cser, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. RSA will be able to better compete with IBM, CA, Oracle and NetIQ, which sell similar access governance capabilities.

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"RSA had to acquire a vendor that was doing identity management and access governance periodic peer reviews and attestation in order to stay competitive," Cser told CRN. "Aveksa is a very scalable and enterprise-ready management platform."

Cser said solution providers should look to RSA to integrate its legacy adaptive authentication portfolio. The company is bolstering its ability to detect patterns and conduct behavioral modeling and could even extend integration with its Silver Tail Systems technology for fraud detection and security, he said.

Aveksa will add situational awareness, the ability to be adaptive to an employee's changing environment with multiple devices. RSA said the company can help build rich user profiles for managing identities, allowing companies to build "situational perimeters" enforcing security policies and access controls to corporate data and resources regardless of location.

Providing access governance across enterprise and cloud environments has become more complicated for enterprises as employees use multiple devices from laptops to tablets and mobile devices to access resources, said Pete Lindstrom, principal and vice president of research at Spire Security.

"Looking to solve the issue of gratuitous identity throughout the cloud and handle it so the idea of who is who and what is what, and what they have access to, is becoming a huge problem," Lindstrom said. "Any vendor or channel provider that can find ways to tie this all together is primed for success in this area."

The company's platform integrates with Active Directory and synchronizes access changes in user profiles such as a change in job roles or termination. It also provides reporting capabilities on user activity, application utilization, password strength and application access requests.

Aveksa competes with Austin, Texas-based SailPoint Technologies, which sells a strong access governance and user provisioning platform. SailPoint will remain the last viable point solution on the market and could be an acquisition target, according to Cser. Intel, which has McAfee under its security portfolio, or Symantec, could make a move for SailPoint's portfolio, he said.

PUBLISHED JULY 8, 2013