Climbing the Ladder: Zero Trust, Single Sign-On, Multiple Applications
It is understood that there is a significant amount of complexity to securing today’s enterprise, especially as more services and applications move to the cloud and a Zero Trust security model is employed. We at Akamai are actively engaged in helping enterprises adjust to a Zero Trust security model and the approach that every user, network access point, and location should be treated the same and not trusted.
Akamai’s Enterprise Application Access (EAA) embraces Zero Trust by providing secure access to applications/data to authenticated and authorized users/devices on a per application basis. This removes trust from the network and thus, reduces the attack surface by controlling access to only specific and necessary applications a user requires to do their job. This also means that verification and authorization decisions need to happen more frequently than in the past. Providing a seamless secure single sign-on experience to all types of applications – whether they are on-premise, IaaS or SaaS apps – can help simplify app-specific access control.
EAA has previously supported access to on-prem and Iaas applications, but with the recent addition of SAML 2.0 IdP functionality in the product, both end users and IT admins will be able to leverage Akamai’s EAA as their launchpad for SaaS applications as well as their enterprise applications hosted in the data center or in public cloud and truly offer a seamless single sign-on experience. So long as the application is designed to understand the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol for authentication and authorization, it can work with Akamai EAA.
By bridging various identity sources, a true single sign-on solution can be implemented to add efficiency and simplicity while maintaining secure access across all enterprise applications, including any SAML 2.0 compliant apps- such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, Workday, DropBox, ServiceNow or Google Suite.
SSO not only simplifies secure access control, but it vastly improves the user experience and increases user productivity. Users enjoy quick and easy authentication to all authorized apps. There is no need to continually type in credentials and remember various user names and passwords, it reduces the need to renew multiple passwords and guards against weak passwords.
If you are interested in learning more about unified security and access controls for specific apps across I/SaaS and on-prem, please check out Enterprise Application Access.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Kristen Raybould. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/1na2-9Yb6IA/climbing-the-ladder-zero-trust-single-sign-on-multiple-applications.html
