TechEd: Centrify Unveils Office 365 Single Sign-On Solution

Centrify announced it will launch a version of its Active Directory management and single sign-on (SSO) solution specifically for Microsoft (MSFT) Office 365. The company made the announcement today at Tech Ed 2013 in New Orleans.

Corey Williams, Centrify’s senior director of Product Management, told Talkin’ Cloud this latest announcement is an extension on Centrify’s existing partnership with Microsoft and improve upon the limited SSO capabilities already available from Microsoft.

One of Microsoft’s biggest challenges, Williams explained, is that partners and customers are burdened in leveraging Active Directory on premises with Office 365 deployments to provide SSO. Although there are capabilities that exist, he said what Microsoft currently offers causes slowdowns in evaluations and initial deployments. The friction created isn’t helping anybody, and so Centrify partnered with Microsoft to bring its technology to the Office 365 world.

“In one sense, we’re sort of a drop-in replacement for ADFS to get up and running with single sign-on in minutes instead of days or weeks,” Williams said.

Centrify built several protocols for Office 365 for easy integration and will provide rich client support for Outlook, Lync and Office clients on both Windows and Mac. It also built Exchange Active Sync protocols for mobile devices.

SSO is becoming a hot topic, especially as more companies adopt multiple cloud services and look for an easy way to manage those services and the login IDs and passwords associated with them. Not an easy thing to do, and some solutions are complicated and time-consuming to deploy. That’s where Centrify is hoping to stand out.

Other vendors offer SSO solutions for Office 365, but Williams said Centrify is more aligned at the technology and platform levels with Microsoft because of its partnership with the Redmond company. Additionally, Centrify’s cloud service was built on Azure.

Another element of Centrify’s strategy is in working with ISVs to tie SSO into other apps. Williams noted that Centrify provides ISVs with password-vaulting capabilities for apps that don’t have any kind of SSO. The idea is it makes it easier for ISVs to add SSO to their apps, which can only improve the use of the technology over time and, hopefully, make SSO more universal.