Hardware access control
The legendary Craig Burton asks:
I have been trying to do some research on Sxip’s announcement of an identity (maybe I missed something) appliance this week and I can’t get to any Sxip sites. Anybody else with this problem?
Craig then follows up to say his comments are down (join the rest of us - Craig!) so I thought I’d answer his question - here.
I pinged Dick on this - as I was curious myself. Then after browsing through the site - I found this quote from Sal Visca - whom I’ve worked with at Marqui:
We wanted to deploy salesforce.com but our development team and IT department had reservations about a hosted application lacking centralized password management and de-provisioning. It was very important to us to be able to disable a user in our corporate directory and be sure that the user no longer had access to any sensitive corporate data. With Sxip Access, we have that assurance. Implementing Sxip Access allowed Marqui to sign-off on salesforce.com and as a result, salesforce.com has been more widely deployed, giving us better visibility into our sales activities and pipeline.”
Sal Visca
CTO
Marqui
Ah - Salesforce doesn’t……. Trust, security, access. Ah yes.
This is classic stuff. With all their bells and whistles, Salesforce doesn’t provide secure reliable provisioning and access control. So if someone leaves your company, they can still get onto the system. Or if you’ve turned off their account, it’s still really there, or the system just ain’t secure enough! Whatever the problem is - it can be fatal.
So Sxip figured that their system would a) be a great helper app for Salesforce while b) showing off the power of Sxip.
As a Sxip developer and supporter this is really imporant.
At the same time - they probably also found out that the cost of incorproating identity security into a system is HUGE and it’s STILL not that reliable. So why not offer the whole security layer as a hosted service - or even better - a box.
Spend all your time on mapping the two ID systems together - and rest assured that no matter what - the Sxip side of the equation is secure and stable.
Brilliant! - if I say so myself.