Orange Business Services and Gemalto Partner on Secure Access to Cloud-based Apps
June 15, 2015
By Peter Bernstein, Senior Editor
We are reminded daily of the sophistication of those with malicious intent, and the frequency with which they attack, creating an increasingly risky online world. It has made the already difficult and stressful job of protecting data, both at rest and on the move, extremely complicated. It is why online security solutions are flourishing and the area is a hotbed of innovation.
The always on and connected digital world will be increasingly, if not predominantly, software-defined, mobility and cloud friendly, applications-driven, and data center-centric for “E”verything. This transformation is causing those responsible, solutions providers and their customers, for creating trustworthy environments and keeping them not just high-performance but secure to evaluate every vector of vulnerability to insure TRUST can be maintained and sustained.
The data on the move part rightfully is drawing much needed attention as enterprises move more and more of their “mission critical” capabilities to the cloud. They want assurance that the links between themselves and their cloud service providers do not become literally the “weakest links.”
It is for this reason that the announcement from digital security solutions provider Gemalto (News - Alert) and communications solutions and integrator Orange Business Services (OBS) of the integration of Gemalto’s SafeNet Authentication Service with OBS’ secure cloud hub Business VPN Galerie is noteworthy.
Safeguarding data on the move in the enterprise
What the integration brings to the table for Business VPN Galerie users is a unified solution that offers seamless multi-factor authentication capability for all of their corporate applications, infrastructure and cloud services, such as Office 365 and Salesforce.com (News - Alert). This means sensitive data interchanges do not have to traverse the Internet and thereby won’t be exposed to both performance and security challenges. What it means for OBS customers is end-to-end access to Gemalto’s multi-tier, multi-tenant cloud-based strong authentication service over the Orange (News - Alert) IP VPN.
“As the world’s first hub between enterprise VPNs and cloud service providers, our Business VPN Galerie is the cloud-enabling foundation for more than 1,200 enterprise customers at over 33,000 sites around the world. By leveraging Gemalto’s authentication solution, we are expanding the ecosystem of available applications though Business VPN Galerie and enhancing the security for applications accessed through our global cloud-enabled network,” said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, Vice President, Networks, Orange Business Services (News - Alert).
"With more services being delivered and accessed from the cloud, security is now top of mind for network service providers and their enterprise customers. The combination of Gemalto’s strong authentication service with the Business VPN Galerie network gives enterprises the assurance of more secure access to applications and data while providing a seamless experience for end users and simpler management for IT administrators,” said Andrew Young, Senior Vice President of Product Management for Authentication and Identity Solutions at Gemalto.
One of the big trends of the last few years has been the recognition by IT security experts and their solutions providers that identity/authentication is “the new perimeter.” In short, companies need to know as much as possible about who, what, where, why, when and how users, their devices and applications that run on those devices. They need to use this information to make sure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect the data every step of its journey from stored state to creating a compelling user experience to the generation of a transactional record and changed state and back again for a variety of analyses.
Having a hub for connecting enterprise VPNs with cloud service providers and combining it with strong authentication provides enterprise with another level of security and a reason to feel that interactions of critical enterprise data with cloud resources can be trusted. It is a layer that could help reduce IT security professionals’ current state of high anxiety.
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