EMC Aveksa buy key to identity in access market
Storage vendor announced it would acquire identity and access management specialist Aveksa yesterday
EMC's buy of Aveksa for an undisclosed sum is clearly meant to position it as an intelligence-driven security vendor for the future – but will analysts agree?
The deal is believed to be a good one for the venture capitalist firm that bankrolled Massachusetts, US-based Aveksa, Charles River Ventures (CRV). Although EMC has not said how much it paid CRV, a Times of India report suggests a figure of $225m (£152m).
Aveksa was formed in 2004 as a private firm and has 150 staff. According to EMC, it is a leader in business-driven identity and access management applications that will augment EMC's RSA Security portfolio.
"Aveksa's innovative technology will help extend RSA's vision of Adaptive IAM, designed to transform traditional static systems into agile, intelligent and scaleable 'situational perimeters' to help organisations dynamically manage user life cycles and access across enterprise and cloud environments," according to EMC's PR blurb.
"Aveksa's leadership in identity and access governance (IAG) and provisioning will help RSA customers ensure that users have appropriate and secure access to applications from within the enterprise or the cloud regardless of their location or device."
The firm will immediately be folded into RSA's Identity Trust Management product group, with enterprise, cloud and mobile access use cases expected to gain.
Art Coviello (pictured), RSA executive chairman and executive vice president at EMC, is counting on enterprises continuing to face big challenges around IAG – not least because of the cloud and mobile trends.
"Security organisations are being asked to secure and provide access to assets they do not own, manage, or control.
"Without the deep intelligence able to provide insight into what users should and should not have access to, traditional tools that simply automate identity and access management leave organisations exposed to the risk of excessive privilege, data breaches and regulatory non-compliance," Coviello said in EMC's statement.
The claim is that RSA and Aveksa together will boost organisations' ability to automate and manage the whole identity life cycle of users in a way that benefits all sizes of business.
Aveksa technology provides a unified dashboard for access delivery and incorporates functionality for enforcing varied identity and access policies across an enterprise and in the cloud and that will enable business users – not just the IT department – to handle this process.
Aveksa's dynamic profiling can take location, job, and security policy into consideration.
The deal follows EMC's buy in late 2012 of web session intelligence vendor Silver Tail Systems, which also augments its RSA division.