EMC Snares Aveksa for Identity, Access Management Smarts

EMC (EMC) has acquired Aveksa, a privately held security provider of identity and access management technology for businesses, a move the storage vendor said will help ensure its RSA customers of appropriate and secure access to applications.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed by either party. EMC, which intends to fold Aveksa into its RSA Security division’s Identity Trust Management product group, said it will not reap any material gain from the transaction for the full 2013 fiscal year.

EMC believes the combined RSA and Aveksa portfolios will deliver to businesses customers a comprehensive identity and governance suite, thereby upgrading traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems into more agile, intelligent and scalable technology. Aveksa’s solutions span multivendor IT systems for on-premise and cloud-based systems, which users control through a unified dashboard to manage, control and deliver access.

The company’s target markets include financial services, health care, retail, energy/utility, telecommunications, transportation and manufacturing.

“Without the deep intelligence able to provide insight into what users should and should not have access to, traditional tools that simply automate IAM leave organizations exposed to the risk of excessive privilege, data breaches and regulatory non-compliance," said Art Coviello, EMC executive vice president and RSA executive chairman. "Together, RSA and Aveksa see tremendous opportunity to help our customers overcome these IAM challenges.”

Deepak Taneja, Aveksa founder and CTO, wrote in a blog post, that when the company began operations in 2004, identity management had a different look and feel than it does today.

“Organizations were just beginning to come to terms with the need to involve the line-of-business in making access decisions and dealing with compliance requirements, and were oftentimes struggling with provisioning deployments that didn’t live up to expectations. At the same time, the threat landscape was much less dangerous than today, and compliance regulations were less onerous,” he wrote.

The combination of the RSA and Aveksa portfolios, however, “heralds a new phase in IAM, one where enterprises can leverage a single IAM platform, delivered on premises or as a set of identity services, that combines Governance, Provisioning, SSO, Adaptive Authentication, Federation, and Authorization – across the hybrid enterprise that spans on-premise, cloud, and mobile,” Taneja wrote.