Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) is rolling out a new platform called O3 Cloud Identity and Access Control to help enterprises better control their employees’ access to the cloud. With a general availability announcement today at the RSA Conference, Symantec is aiming to make it safer and easier for enterprises to embrace cloud services.
“O3 is a name that reflects the molecule for ozone which is a code name we used internally,” Dave Elliott, senior product marketing manager at Symantec, told InternetNews.com. “We think ozone is a nice metaphor for protection and a new layer of security that goes above the cloud.”
Elliott explained that a core component of the solution is the O3 Gateway, which is the control point for cloud access. The deployment scenario is that users authenticate via the O3 gateway, which in turn federates with any enterprise user identity story including Active Directory and LDAP. On top of the O3 Gateway is an administrator console called the O3 Intelligence Center which is where policies are provided for the gateway. The total solution then provides policy driven control to external clouds or to internal web applications.
“The Gateway works as a reverse proxy,” Elliott explained.
Reverse proxies are commonly used for load balancing static and dynamic content across multiple internal Web servers in an organization. The reverse proxy connects directly with end-users to deliver content from a given web resource.
“At the highest level, with O3 you have single-sign for the cloud,” Elliott said.
Read the full story at eSecurityPlanet:
Symantec Launches Single Sign-On for the Cloud
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.