So Amazon is definitely up to something. I noted yesterday that AWS offers free database access and now Amazon is touting something almost every enterprise site needs with a Sign Sign On (SSO) and Identity Management service. Jack McCarthy of CRN has an article about the new service in the AWS Marketplace. Clearly Amazon is focused on much more than infrastructure as a service as they continue to add services to their marketplace and make it easier to bring all those services together to build a wide range of functionality.
“As the AWS account owner, you now have fine-grained control over usage and software costs,” Jeff Barr, senior manager, cloud computing solutions at Amazon, wrote in a blog about the announcement.
“Roles and permissions are created and managed through IAM, making it easy to get started, and easy to add controls for AWS Marketplace to new or existing IAM groups,” Barr added. “You can now use Marketplace permissions to control access to Marketplace and to the EC2 [Elastic Compute 2 Web service] instances that it launches, based on a user’s role in the business.”
Amazon said it has created three templates for clients who want to use AWS Identity and Access Management.
I keep thinking that the future right now belongs to Amazon and Salesforce in this space. Sure, they have a huge number of competitors rushing into this space and that won’t let up. It’s just as obvious that neither of these companies has chosen to rest on their laurels.
