GlobalSign IAM Makes Managing Customer and Partner Identities Secure

• Mar 18, 2015

At the Gartner IAM Summit in London, GMO GlobalSign, a provider of identity services for online transactions and the security division of Tokyo-based GMO Internet, debuted GlobalSign IAM-Easy, a new pre-configured Identity Relationship and Access Management (IRAM) solution designed to dramatically simplify the management of customer and partner identities and their access to e-Service and portals. In as little as four weeks, GlobalSign can deliver the business benefits of an end-to-end IRAM solution.

Traditional IAM (Identity and Access Management) solutions were designed for an internal directory focus and often lack the comprehensive support for a multitude of services, identity types, authentication methods and federation protocols to manage identities for thousands of external users. By taking a business focused approach to IRAM, GlobalSign IAM-Easy offers the fastest route to managing identities and access to e-Services and portals -- enabling new revenue models, reducing customer care costs and improving end-user experiences.

With Gartner's latest IAM report explicitly recommending to clients that they "do not plan to massively customize IAM infrastructure” and to “focus on solutions that allow for rapid configuration,"¹ GlobalSign's IAM-Easy enables organizations to enact best practices in IAM far more efficiently, and reap the benefits of new revenue models, increased customer loyalty and lower IT costs.

"GlobalSign IAM-Easy made it possible for us to deploy a comprehensive Identity Relationship and Access Management solution to our customer in less than four weeks," said Ville Särmälä, CEO, Knowit Oy, based in Helsinki. "As a system integrator our main goal is to deliver high-quality solutions to our customers on time and on budget. GlobalSign IAM-Easy truly lives up to its name as we were able to rapidly deploy the platform and integrate the customer's CRM and e-Service platforms to the IRAM solution."

GlobalSign IAM-Easy is a pre-configured deployment model of the complete GlobalSign IRAM solution that is coupled with best practices. This makes it easy for organizations to register users, offer self-service identity management and multiple levels of authorization to provide secure access to their portals and e-Services. It is available for on-premise and private cloud deployments, and can be delivered within a short time (in as little as 4 weeks) and with a fixed cost. GlobalSign IAM-Easy delivers efficiency and cost saving benefits by allowing business units to:

• Authenticate external users properly, and offer corporate customers single sign-on from their own network to your services;
• Offer identity self-service processes, and workflows to reduce the burden on customer service and provide a positive user experience;
• Know external users' roles and what services they are accessing;
• Strengthen security with support for over 20 different authentication methods, including out-of-band multi-factor methods and digital certificates for business critical transactions;
• Allow external users to bring their own identities by offering user-driven federation to strengthen weak identities with strong ones -- creating verified social and business identities;
• Automate external user management with integration with your CRM system;
• Avoid security breaches that can negatively impact business and reputation; and
• Implement a robust IRAM solution that can support multiple e-Services and millions of users.

GlobalSign's IRAM solutions are based on technology developed at GlobalSign's Center of IAM Excellence in Finland by the former Ubisecure, which was acquired by GlobalSign in 2014, and presently in use on a massive scale in Europe -- by over three million citizens who access Finnish governmental records, as well as by manufacturers, utility companies, service providers and dozens of other organizations that provide external identity relationship and access management.

Info Security Products Guide, an information security research and advisory guide, named GlobalSign IAM-Easy as a finalist for the 11^th Annual 2015 Global Excellence Awards in the New Product category, in recognition of the way GlobalSign IAM-Easy is helping set the bar higher for others in information security.

"With the IAM market growing over 14% this year alone,² it's clear that businesses are putting a high priority to IAM deployments, especially for the extended enterprise. But many organizations still find them far too complicated and time-consuming," said Joan Lockhart, GlobalSign's chief marketing officer. "We are delighted to help more enterprises to do what Gartner and other industry analysts suggest: focus on solutions that allow rapid deployment and agility, so that teams can manage identities and access not just within, but beyond their organizations -- with the speed and ease they need."

¹ Gartner, Inc. in 2015 Planning Guide for Identity and Access Management, October 2, 2014
² "IAM Market Global Forecasts to 2019," Markets and Markets, February 2015, as published at http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/identity-access-management-iam.asp