Mark Diodati

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Mark Diodati
Research VP
6 years at Gartner
21 years IT industry

Mark Diodati is a Research Vice President with Gartner's IT Professionals research and advisory service. His focus topics include mobility, authentication, cloud idenitity, federation, directory services, provisioning, identity services, Active Directory interoperability, Web access management…Read Full Bio

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Quest Acquires Symlabs

by Mark Diodati  |  June 6, 2011  |  Comments Off

Quest is actively building out its identity management product portfolio.  Some notable acquisitions:

  • Vintela (Active Directory Bridge – 2005)
  • Völcker Informatik AG (provisioning/access governance – late 2010)
  • e-DMZ Security—privileged account management – early 2011)

Today, Quest announced the acquisition of Symlabs, a vendor with virtual directory and federation products.

In its early days, virtual directories dramatically decreased the deployment time associated with web access management (WAM) systems. Customers were able to present a single data view to the WAM system without a multi-year meta-directory project on the critical path. Over time, virtual directories became more valuable, particularly for federation identity provider (IdP) deployments.

The latest trend in enhanced directory services is the synchronization (sync) server, which will happily replicate user accounts from the enterprise directory store to SaaS applications. Account replication (and yes, federation) is an essential component for extending existing enterprise identity management to Cloud-based applications. The synchronization server is built into federation systems from CA (previously Arcot), Ping Identity, and VMware (formerly TriCipher). Unbound ID has a standalone sync server, and Radiant Logic has integrated the capability into its virtual directory products.

The purchase of the virtual directory and federation products is a good one and will serve Quest customers well. The federation product functions well for the “to” the Cloud scenario described above. In order to be competitive and support the same important scenario, the Virtual Directory must pick up sync server capabilities ASAP. The two products will then work in harmony to provision users and sign them into SaaS applications.

I’ll be talking about identity and Cloud applications at this year’s Catalyst Conference in late July.

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