Applied Identity, a leading provider of identity-driven access management solutions, today announced at Interop 2007 that it is now shipping the initial release of its ID-Unify™ identity virtualization appliance. ID-Unify reduces the cost and complexity of Access Management within the enterprise by consolidating identities across multiple and disparate identity stores, enabling the centralization of access policies and the facilitation of identity-based audit reports that mitigate risk and aid in regulatory compliance.

Paving the way for its release into the general marketplace, ID-Unify has been successfully tested and deployed within the network of a large U.S. government civilian agency. In utilizing ID-Unify, the federal agency was able to solve a long-standing policy and identity management problem that had remained unsolvable for years.

ID-Unify solves problems that both mid-tier organizations and large enterprises are seeking to address — the issue of how to enable the efficient collaboration of users across different locations and multiple, often disparate identity stores to improve productivity. Today, enterprises choose one of several routes for managing this problem: either manually creating and managing new user identities for transient staff, or creating duplicate instances of the same application in separate domains. Alternatively, they may attempt to unify all users in a single meta directory — which can take years and immense budgets to implement. ID-Unify solves these problems as a turnkey appliance solution that creates a centralized virtual directory that normalizes user identities across all directory stores, enabling the global consolidation of policy and access permissions managed from a single point within the network.

“The Access Management space is ripe for an appliance-based solution,” says Earl Perkins, Research Vice President of the Security and Privacy team of Gartner Research. “Much like the firewall market progressed from software on a server to appliances, the Access Management market will likely move in this direction as well, as ease of deployment and maintenance are key customer requirements in this space.”

ID-Unify is unique in the marketplace, differing from other virtual directory products in that it provides:

1. Centralized management for creating, refining, and managing user access policy via role, user, group or application.

2. Native interoperability with Applied Identity's network-level access control appliance, ID-Enforce™

3. User identity reconciliation regardless of whether the native IDs are unique or overlapping

“ID-Unify helps to bring the operations of the entire enterprise together in a relatively painless manner,” said Jon Shalowitz, Vice President of Products for Applied Identity. “Applied Identity's unique value proposition is that we use virtualization to bridge the gap between two critical areas — Access Control and Identity Management. What that means is that we enable centralization without changing an organization's underlying infrastructure. Particularly in a time of expanding network perimeters, accelerating corporate acquisitions and business consolidations, ID-Unify provides companies with an immediate answer to the pressing issue of 'How do I more easily manage the identities and policies of all of the employee, contractor, and partner users that I want to have access to my network, without unduly compromising the resources and political sensibilities of the greater organization?'”

ID-Unify Showcase at Interop 2007

The new ID-Unify appliance will be showcased in Las Vegas at this year's Interop 2007 conference. Applied Identity representatives will be on-hand at Booth # 305 and at the Microsoft Partner Pavilion #1548 to discuss and demonstrate ID-Unify and other products within the company's Identisphere product line.