This guest post comes courtesy of our partner, Centrify.
Whether you are an SMB with hundreds of users or a large enterprise with tens of thousands of users, when it comes to making Office 365 deployments to be effective, it must be scalable to on-board existing & add new O365 users quickly and thereafter enable easy access to all users anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
This leads into several challenges:
- User provisioning – do I as the IT admin have to manually add hundreds or thousands of my employee accounts, assign their licenses, and manage their roles and access controls within these cloud apps?
- Easy 1-click access – will I as the end user have to supply my login credentials every time I try to access Office 365 wherever I am?
- Secure mobile access – If I do find a Single Sign-on (SSO) solution, how can it protect all the devices on which I would access Office 365 from, in the wake of those devices’ theft or compromise?
Thanks to Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solutions, IT and end users can experience:
- Seamless integration with Active Directory and Office 365
- Automatic user provisioning from Active Directory based upon roles & groups
- Policy and role based access by location, time and device
- Password-free secure login to any SaaS app from anywhere
- Secure management and support for any mobile device
- All through a single, centralized IT management console
Meet the Centrify IDaaS solution — built on Microsoft Azure.
Centrify is a Microsoft validated “Works with Office 365” solution
Centrify for Office 365 runs on the Azure cloud platform and is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based single sign-on, user provisioning and mobility management for Office 365. Centrify helps partners and customers to rapidly deploy Offic e365 and fast-track its service adoption by licensed users. Centrify for Office 365 is a Microsoft tested and certified “Works with Office 365” solution across key user scenarios with established protocols to ensure quality joint customer support. Simply put, Centrify is “on strategy” with Microsoft as an Office 365 partner.
Hear directly from James Baker, Technical Product Manager for Office 365 at Microsoft and Clifford Russell, CIO at Morehouse College, an Office 365 and Centrify customer:
Integrated User, Device, and Application Management
As mentioned, one of the biggest hurdles to cloud and BYOD is solving the lifecycle of challenges associated with managing users, their devices, and their apps instantly and continuously. Centrify’s unique IDaaS solution provides cloud identity management, combined with mobile device and app management.
Centrify’s user account provisioning functionality enables IT to automatically create user accounts across 3000+ cloud applications and platforms, including Office 365. IT can instantly deploy Office 365 to new users immediately and assign their access to multiple platforms and devices, all from a single enterprise directory like AD. This capability to provision users also allows IT to assign the appropriate permissions and licensing to the user, restricting or allowing access to certain applications based on location, time and endpoints.
Once Centrify is deployed, within a few hours users can continuously enjoy 1-click access to a rich catalog of over 3000 SaaS apps from desktops and mobile devices (Zero Sign On) and get self-service device management features like the ability to remotely track, lock, and wipe devices through user friendly web portals.
Additionally, IDaaS from Centrify includes – at no extra cost – an industry leading cloud-based MDM and MAM solution to offer comprehensive enterprise mobility management (EMM) features that help IT admins secure and protect the mobile devices, which are today’s de-facto endpoints for consuming cloud apps.
Mac Identity & Device Management
Centrify also provides the industry’s most comprehensive Enterprise-grade Management for Mac. Join Macs to Active Directory, and provide SSO to your Mac users for apps like Office365. Leverage Active Directory Group Policy to manage Macs just like Windows machines. Once users login with their Active Directory credentials they’re granted seamless access to corporate resources and apps, based on IT-defined roles and policies.
Cut Time to Implementation with Perficient and Centrify
Centrify is excited to announce our newly formed partnership with Perficient, a leading technology and management consulting firm serving clients throughout the United States. We see this partnership as a huge advantage to both our organizations in not only helping to address, service and support the ongoing problem of properly provisioning applications like Office365 but also with thousands of other SaaS, mobile and on premise applications together with Centrify’s complete Identity Platform.
Perficient offers a variety of Microsoft Advisory Services (MAS) specifically designed to mitigate all the above challenges through comprehensive cloud readiness and deployment workshops. Working in partnership with Centrify, deploying Office 365 with full user, device, and application SSO takes only a few hours, versus weeks with traditional tools.
