EMC Buys ID Manager Aveksa

Big news in the world of cloud security came out of Massachusetts yesterday when EMC and Aveksa issued a joint press release lauding the acquisition of Aveksa, a company founded with an aim at providing identity verification, by EMC. Aveksa will be brought in under the EMC umbrella, working in their RSA security division.

According to The Times of India, credited with first reporting the story, the acquisition has cost EMC in the neighborhood of $225 million in cash. And Aveksa was purportedly anxious to ink the deal as the writing was on the wall that EMC (and outfits like it) were more likely than not working on developing their own identity verification capabilities.

Deepak Taneja, co-founder of Aveksa, offered up a brief history of Identity and Access Management (IAM) dating back to the founding of his company. As he states on his blog, “Our initial vision for Aveksa involved helping organizations make better and more effective access decisions, enabling the business (rather than IT) to decide whether people’s access was appropriate based on business context.” Of course he cops to the IAM landscape of today being for more advanced and complex than it was back in 2004.

With the above recognition, combined with greater demand by organizations for a “simple ‘one-brain’ IAM solution,” Taneja states the acquisition by EMC will ultimately help Aveksa’s initial and continuing vision become reality by increasing both the manpower and technology necessary to provide a top-notch identity verification product for consumers.

In a statement to Reuters, EMC’s RSA claimed they intended to utilize some of Aveksa’s existing product line in order to provide a single web-based “cloud platform” that would be an effective deterrent to anyone trying to break into a network.

Highlighting the market position the acquisition would afford EMC, KuppingerColes pointed out this would be the first time one vendor would offer both strong authentication and Identity and Access Governance (IAG). The analysis firm went on to comment, “That will allow creating access governance for risk- and context-based authentication and authorization, the next big trend in IT.”

Speaking on the acquisition, RSA Executive Chairman and Executive VP of EMC, Art Coviello stated, “Today’s enterprises face significant challenges around Identity and Access Management. The adoption of cloud-based IT infrastructures and the pervasive use of mobile means that security organizations are being asked to secure and provide access to assets they don’t 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 IAM leave organizations exposed to the risk of excessive privilege, data breaches and regulatory non-compliance. Together, RSA and Aveksa see tremendous opportunity to help our customers overcome these IAM challenges.”

Concluding on his blog entry, Taneja saw this acquisition as a paradigm-shift in the identity verification industry. “With the RSA team, we look forward to defining a new vision for IAM, and to continuing to work closely with our customers and partners to make this a reality.”