BeyondTrust Acquires Assets Of Likewise Software To Expand Access Management Business

BeyondTrust, a maker of identity and access management software, has acquired some of the assets of Likewise Software in order to enable access management in cross-platform environments of Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X operating systems. The Likewise acquisition will also further enable BeyondTrust to protect customers in both cloud and on-premise environments.

Likewise Enterprise and Likewise Open software products will be renamed PowerBroker Identity Services-Enterprise Edition and PowerBroker Identity Services-Open Edition, respectively, consistent with BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker branding for other products. Likewise will continue in operation, offering data governance products for storage systems. Terms of the asset acquisition deal were not disclosed.

With the Identity Services products, IT managers can offer single sign-on convenience for users whose access is controlled through Microsoft’s Active Directory, even if they are on a Linux, Unix or Mac system, says Jim Zierick, executive VP of product operations at BeyondTrust. Without it, users would need unique sign-on identities for each operating system. BeyondTrust already has a product called Directory Integrator that does single sign-on for multiple OSes. BeyondTrust will continue to support Directory Integrator, but it is not as feature-rich as Identity Services.

"Our value proposition is to give them [customers] a consistent, policy-based way to control who has privileged access to what infrastructure," says Zierick.

Identity and access management is a critical component of an enterprise’s network security, he says, given that many breaches are caused by an insider threat in which an employee gains access to sensitive files by abusing access privileges. Access management software determines which employees have access to which parts of the network. The software also monitors and audits access records to identify when unauthorized access may have occurred.PowerBroker Identity Services provides centralized user management for Linux, Unix and Mac users, adding them to Active Directory in less than 5 minutes, BeyondTrust says. It also does not require extending Active Directory schema to add non-Windows systems to the corporate network.

BeyondTrust will also continue to offer the open source version of Identity Services, which was originally offered by Likewise. The open source version has been downloaded 100,000 times, and its community includes about 40,000 organizations that are using it and contributing code to add features, says Zierick.

"Many of [those who] have used the open product to do the basics have realized that to get the full benefits, they want to upgrade to the features that are in the enterprise product," he says.

As with existing BeyondTrust products, the PowerBroker Identity Services software offers identity and access management in traditional and cloud computing environments, although Zierick says most of the cloud activity is in private cloud environments within a corporate firewall rather than public clouds beyond the firewall.

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