6 October, 2006 - 12:45pm

Gartner Research recently reported that last year Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) accounted for 5% of all business software revenue. This amounts to approximately a $7 billion market this year. They predict that SaaS will reach 25% of new business software revenues in 2011, and roughly a $30-40 billion market. Given this massive increase in on-demand usage, businesses need to consider the identity management and security implications of using all these hosted applications.

The use of delegated authentication by salesforce.com, Postini, and other leading ASPs resolves these issues. Unlike traditional federated solutions, the emerging delegated authentication technologies are more flexible and simple to use and deploy both for the enterprise and ASP. Delegated authentication allows enterprises to control user access through their own LDAP thus offering:

• users rely on a single, unique corporate password, thus conforming to authentication policies and reducing help desk costs associated with lost, forgotten or stolen credentials
• ensures that users are always authenticated against the authoritative corporate directory
• rapid provisioning and deprovisioning though a simple, integrated interface enables administrators to instantly create, modify or revoke user access

Sxip Access, provides identity management for the ASP marketplace, delivering seamless single sign-on and tight corporate directory integration easily and securely. Organizations can quickly you can get up and running with their ASP through bulk provisioning and centralized user management, enabling control of data access and usage of from their corporate network.