With any efficiency in technology, it’s not uncommon for it to make management more difficult. As companies move more applications into the cloud, there become additional challenges. When you look at organizations with multiple SaaS applications, you can see it becomes challenging and at times even more difficult to manage users than we do today.
For years, IT has been dealing with Windows Applications—by now, we thoroughly understand how to deploy them, control access to them, and how to integrate them into our AD and domain structure. But web-based SaaS apps create a new complexity outside of that. Who gets to manage those SaaS applications and the access to them? IT ends up doing it, that’s who. Given the likelihood that all of these SaaS apps are managed separately because they come from different suppliers, when a new employee joins an organization it could take weeks to get all the accounts and access configured properly in all the various SaaS systems. Same goes for when an employee leaves.
Enter Project Horizon from VMware. We first publicly heard about this offering at VMWorld this year. Horizon is intended to establish a “cloud identity” and federate on-premise directory services between private and public clouds, so users can access apps from within an organization or from outside with a single identification. Access to those internal and SaaS-based apps would be controlled by IT.
Horizon will allow IT administrators to manage the user and provide both SaaS applications like Salesforce, Google, Zimbra, and also internally deploy Virtual Desktops through View and streamed ThinApps for the user. When the end user signs on with their Active Directory credentials, he or she could just click on the icons and get both internal and SaaS-based apps automatically, as if those apps lived on the local device.
The initial release of the product (due to be release sometime 2011) will be limited to SaaS applications only; however, in subsequent releases, this will emerge as a SaaS platform from which they’ll be able to rapidly roll out additional features and capabilities with View and ThinApp.
