Contact: Wendy Nather, Brenon Daly
The identity and access management (IAM) market has evolved far beyond hooking up Active Directory with cloud-based identity management and single sign-on to a whole realm of business context that needs to be addressed. To cover that, EMC’s RSA Security has acquired Aveksa, a ‘business-driven IAM’ vendor, adding to the security giant’s existing portfolio of authentication, analytics and governance offerings.
Much of RSA’s portfolio has come through a steady flow of M&A. The security division of EMC typically acquires one or two startups each year. We would note that deal flow is much slower than EMC’s other major division, VMware. Nonetheless, RSA has made significant moves in recent years, adding Silver Tail Systems (antifraud), NetWitness (event monitoring) and Archer Technologies (GRC), among others.
With Aveksa, RSA will get a solid source of identity governance, user provisioning and access management to go along with its authentication business. RSA says that another reason for the acquisition was the speed with which Aveksa could be rolled out in the enterprise. The published claim is that roughly 70% of customers were up and running in production within four months – a far cry from traditional IAM infrastructures, which can take years to customize and deploy. (See our full report.)