ThycoticCentrify on Tuesday announced the release of Account Lifecycle Manager (ALM) — a tool that lets security teams discover, provision, and manage service accounts for all the major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform.
Jon Kuhn, senior vice president of product management at ThycoticCentrify, said as companies accelerate digital transformation, multi-cloud environments have become the norm, so without the proper tools multi-cloud environments can become a security risk.
“As cloud-native application development increases, the operational burden to gain visibility and control to service accounts becomes overwhelming, raising the risk of compromised assets,” Kuhn explained. “ALM provides cloud infrastructure teams with discovery and visibility tools to inventory service accounts, then applies consistent security policies to significantly reduce the multi-cloud risk surface area.”
Jack Poller, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said ThycoticCentrify’s ALM tool comes just as the industry has transitioned to a multi-cloud environment. Poller said recent research from ESG found that 95% of organizations currently use public cloud services, and 8 out of 10 IaaS users have a multi-cloud strategy with more than half using more than three cloud service providers.
“These multi-cloud organizations tell us their highest priority is to build an identity and access management strategy that can be used across heterogenous public and private clouds, followed closely by the ability to protect, monitor, and audit user, service account, and administrative management actions,” Poller said. “I expect ThycoticCentrify’s ALM to spark lots of interest from enterprise identity management and governance professionals.”
Frank Dickson, program vice president for security and trust at IDC, added that the management of cloud identities has become one of the hottest markets in security. While multi-cloud has become the “battle cry” of the day, Dickson said each cloud service has unique identities to manage.
“Each cloud provider offers rich identity features, but every IaaS provider enables identity completely differently,” Dickson explained. “The result is that the complexity of managing cloud identities does not grow arithmetically with the addition of each new IaaS offering, but exponentially. Identity lifecycle management tools for multi-cloud are the foundation to building zero-trust architectures.”
