Ping Identity Adds Authorization to Strengthen Enterprise Access Controls for Applications in the Cloud

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ping Identity^®, The Cloud Identity Security Leader™, today announced new authorization capabilities in its PingFederate identity bridge software that allows enterprises to define and enforce the broadest spectrum of access controls for all of their cloud applications. With the addition of token authorization to its unique adaptive federation capabilities that include authentication rules and chaining introduced earlier this year, PingFederate 6.10 provides a flexible and simple solution for enforcing most authentication and authorization policies within the single sign-on (SSO) process for all cloud applications.

“Based on our experience providing comprehensive authorization solutions to leading financial institutions, government entities and global manufacturers, we look forward to working with Ping Identity customers, helping them to easily connect Axiomatics Policy Server with PingFederate, to achieve fully integrated authentication and authorization.”

“Every business needs application access controls that meet a variety of business and security policies,” said Roger Oberg, vice president of marketing for Ping Identity. “The remarkable thing about PingFederate 6.10 is the degree of flexibility it offers customers and their partners to define and enforce policies within the single sign-on process, without deploying additional infrastructure or changing applications.”

“Whether an organization wants tighter control over employee access to applications or a service provider wants to create an additional decision point before granting access, PingFederate 6.10 gives greater control to IT,” said Ping Identity Director of Product Management Loren Russon. “A growing group of compliance-aware customers have been asking for a lightweight approach to incorporating additional authorization checks in to their existing SSO frameworks.”

Gartner advises that without greater control over authorization, identity teams will struggle to understand and manage how and why people can perform actions in applications. Identity teams looking to identify and minimize access-related risk need to strengthen their authorization management capabilities before software-as-a-service and pull-based architectures become the norm.*

“Authorization poses challenges to every enterprise, not just those in highly regulated industries. The nature of these challenges has evolved. The problems of authorization are complex and only becoming more so,” said Gartner Analyst Ian Glazer. “Enterprises will need to find ways to enrich their existing enforcement points with more specific authorization policies and enhancing an existing federation infrastructure with expressive attribute-based authorization policies is a solid first step. By moving access control decisions from within an application to a dedicated authorization service, IT organizations can better ensure that they are staying current with the constantly changing business and security policies, while having centralized audit and management capabilities.”

The extensibility of PingFederate allows enterprises to centrally enforce more complex authorization policies defined within authorization management vendors such as Axiomatics and ViewDS.

“It is exciting to see the new externalized authorization capabilities now available in PingFederate, which will give customers more flexibility and control in their federation deployments for a wider range of business use cases,” said Gerry Gebel, President Axiomatics Americas. “Based on our experience providing comprehensive authorization solutions to leading financial institutions, government entities and global manufacturers, we look forward to working with Ping Identity customers, helping them to easily connect Axiomatics Policy Server with PingFederate, to achieve fully integrated authentication and authorization.”

“ViewDS Identity Solutions is extremely pleased with the launch of the Ping Identity Token Authorization component, as it tightly melds PingFederate with the ViewDS Access Sentinel solution. This combination provides customers a one-stop shop for SAML and OAuth-based authentication for consumer, enterprise and Cloud services,” said Andrew Ferguson, Director International Business Development, ViewDS Identity Solutions.

Other new features in PingFederate 6.10 include interoperability with thick client and thin client versions of Microsoft Office 365, intelligent reporting and monitoring with Splunk and additional token and scope policy management for OAuth. See the release notes for a complete listing of new features. Existing customers can upgrade to PingFederate 6.10 free of charge. New customers can call sales at 1.877.898.2905 or email sales@pingidentity.com to schedule a proof of concept or to learn more.

Learn more about PingFederate 6.10

About Ping Identity | The Cloud Identity Security Leader

Ping Identity provides cloud identity security solutions to more than 800 of the world's largest companies, government organizations and cloud businesses. With a 99% customer satisfaction rating, Ping Identity empowers 45 of the Fortune 100 to secure hundreds of millions of employees, customers, consumers and partners using secure, open standards like SAML, OpenID and OAuth. Businesses that depend on the Cloud rely on Ping Identity to deliver simple, proven and secure cloud identity management through single sign-on, federated identity management, mobile identity security, API security, social media integration, and centralized access control. Visit pingidentity.com for more information.

* Achieving Greater Control Over Authorization,” (ID: G00218654) 22 November 2011 by Gartner Analyst Ian Glazer