Surging cloud sign-on demand reflected in Centrify growth

Unified identity management provider Centrify has reported record sales during 2014, reflecting the growth in demand for cloud-based user authentication solutions as well as early successes for the company's partner-based growth strategy.

The company, which has grown quickly from its US base and established its Australian operation in 2011, reported that its revenue had grown by 40 percent year on year across multiple quarters. The company doubled its cloud customer base in 2014

Centrify now claims over 5000 customers worldwide and a 97 percent customer retention rate, highlighting the demand for portable user authentication capabilities that span in-house, cloud, and mobile devices.

“We are extending ourselves to having additional devices tie onto our cloud service,” Centrify CEO Tom Kemp previously told CSO Australia.

“We think it's possible that you don't have to completely rearchitect your environment [for SSO], but that you can enhance and extend your existing cloud and mobile to give users the devices they want – and to enable their existing IT tools.”

Such capabilities are becoming increasingly relevant for a broad range of consumers, who are responding to ongoing reports of cybersecurity breaches and theft of personal information with a growing sense of concern.

A recent Centrify user survey found that 1 in 3 people had been victims of identity theft, often at a significant cost in time and money: 52 percent said it took more than a month to fix the identity theft, while 31 percent said they had spent over $100 to fix the problem.

That demand is likely to expand as Centrify works to broaden the reach and accessibility of its solutions. This month, the company announced that it would deliver its identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) offering through a global network of managed service providers (MSPs), allowing them to bundle SSO capabilities with service offerings such as Office 365, Google Apps, VPN-based remote access, and more.

An additional capability, released in December, allows the authentication to be extended to internal Web applications without using a VPN.

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This approach will allow MSPs to bundle Centrify ID verification services into the increasing roster of services they are delivering to customers, in turn positioning SSO as a core capability to improve the user experience.

Liqeur producer Remy Cointreau is on the record as one of Centrify's satisfied customers. “I knew that if we wanted to build a secure environment with seamless access for users, we needed a framework,” CTO Alexandre Page-Relo said in a statement. “We can seamlessly log our employees into our custom apps without prompting for credentials.”

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.


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