Looking to strengthen its cloud and zero-trust postures in the “work from anywhere” era, SASE cloud security company iboss on Tuesday announced an alliance with Ping Identity to integrate the iboss and Ping cloud platforms.
Security analysts saw this as a good match because both iboss and Ping use the security assertion markup language (SAML) standards to authorize users and authenticate user privileges to access a cloud application. SAML lets IT organizations securely control what apps users can access based on configured zero-trust policies and the user’s role.
“Users today require fast and secure access to the applications they need to do their jobs, which is why verifying who a user is before allowing access is so important,” said Paul Martini CEO of iboss. “Our integration with Ping Identity will let customers accelerate IT adoption of a zero-trust security architecture to help them better support the modern ‘work from anywhere’ workforce.”
As companies look to realize the promise of SASE, they have been struck by the enormity of the task, said Frank Dickson, program vice president for security and trust at IDC. No one vendor can deliver on the promise, so integrations are required, explained Dickson.
“The COVID-19 ‘work from home’ migrations have highlighted that delivering on the SASE promise requires security practitioners to focus on the four security control points of hybrid work: endpoints, applications, data and identity,” Dickson said. “The collaboration of iboss edge security and Ping’s identity offerings applies identity context to iboss’s ability to deliver security at the edge and enables a tangible delivery of zero-trust.”
Jack Poller, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, added that Ping Identity’s user authentication and single sign-on are a great fit to integrate with iboss’ SASE solutions, reducing user friction and simplifying admin workload while ensuring that identities are authenticated and synchronized across the environment.
“The organizational shift to least privileged access principles and zero-trust strategies, which requires user authentication and authorization for every transaction, tends to increase complexity, and simplification, such as integrating Ping with iboss, reduces the attack surface, increases security, and improves productivity,” Poller said.
