Cloud Sherpas Selects myOneLogin for Secure Single Sign-On

TriCipher Delivers Private Clouds to Leading Cloud Computing Systems Integrator

LOS GATOS, Calif. and ATLANTA (Nov. 20, 2008) — Cloud Sherpas, a pure-play cloud computing systems integrator, has selected TriCipher to deliver strong authentication, single sign-on convenience and identity federation to its portfolio of enterprise-ready cloud computing solutions. Together, the businesses are enabling mid-to-large enterprise IT organizations to securely embrace IT services delivered via the Web and realize the overall economic and productivity benefits of cloud computing.

“We’re guiding large organizations to the cloud every day,” said Michael Cohn, CEO at Cloud Sherpas. “TriCipher’s myOneLogin allows us to create ‘Private Clouds’ through its federation capabilities and deliver secure single sign-on across the portfolio of cloud solutions we offer to enterprise customers.”

Securing access to sensitive company data

Cloud Sherpas offers an alternative to legacy, on-premise messaging and collaboration solutions, specializing in enterprise migrations from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes to Google Apps for enterprises. TriCipher’s myOneLogin provides secure single sign-on to a portfolio of Internet applications, including Google Apps, and protects businesses by:

• Safeguarding logins with strong authentication, delivered seamlessly as an on-demand service
• Enabling IT managers to instantly revoke privileges from end-users when they leave the business, helping prevent unauthorized access to sensitive company data

“In today’s economy, businesses are rapidly adopting cloud computing solutions to boost productivity and cut costs,” said Vatsal Sonecha, vice president of business development and product management at TriCipher. “As a leading cloud computing systems integrator, Cloud Sherpas is now offering their enterprise customers a strong authentication, single sign on solution that integrates across their product portfolio.”

Creating a federated environment for enterprise cloud computing

TriCipher’s myOneLogin Federation lets partnering businesses communicate securely, by extending the identity assurance measures of one company to another while offering fast-growing online communities the ability to expand at a moment’s notice. Employees benefit from having a single site to access all their online applications and IT administrators benefit from having a federated management console for those applications. myOneLogin Federation is the only entirely web-based solution – making activation immediate and giving any business the ability to safely control when and how they connect to new partners, by managing their own private clouds.

###

About TriCipher

TriCipher, Inc. provides a unified authentication infrastructure to protect web and enterprise portals, the people that use them and the business process that flows through them against fraud and identity theft. The TriCipher Armored Credential System™ (TACS) is the first authentication system that enables companies to deploy and manage multiple types of credentials from a single infrastructure. Through this flexible “Authentication Ladder,” TriCipher protects customer investment by adjusting authentication strength to defeat new threats and to meet regulatory changes without the need to implement a new infrastructure. Recently, TriCipher introduced myOneLogin™ the first secure on-demand offering that delivers strong authentication, single sign-on (SSO) convenience and the ability to seamlessly integrate multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in a single solution. Founded in 2000, TriCipher is headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif. The company is funded by ArrowPath Venture Capital, EPIC Ventures, Intel Capital, RBC Technology Ventures, and Trident Capital. For more information, visit TriCipher on the web at www.tricipher.com.

About Cloud Sherpas

Cloud Sherpas (www.cloudsherpas.com) is a pure-play cloud computing systems integrator, delivering a suite of solutions that enable mid-to-large enterprises to improve productivity, reduce cost and lower risk. The company has earned the confidence of customers in a wide range of industries and holds the distinction of being an enterprise deployment partner for Google, EMC, TriCipher, GoGrid, Nirvanix and other leading cloud computing vendors.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

Google chat now does video!

The pace of Google’s innovation can sometimes makes your head spin.  In a little over a day, they released a major upgrade to Gtalk (instant messaging) to over 35+ million users.  I don’t think I’d even call it an upgrade -  the difference between a chat program and full audio/video conference application doesn’t really fit my definition of an “upgrade”.  For those that haven’t started using it already, see the details below.  The audio and video performance is very good.

About voice and video chat

Voice and video in Gmail only works with the newer version of Gmail in supported browsers: FF 2.0+, IE 6.0+, Safari 3.0+, and Google Chrome.

Since sometimes reading “lol” doesn’t deliver the same punch as actually hearing your friend laugh at your jokes, you can now use voice and video capabilities in your Gmail chat. From within Gmail, you can have an actual conversation with someone (seriously, out loud), or even chat face to face over video.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.
• Sign in to Gmail.
• In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call to them; just click Video & more

If your friend doesn’t have a camera next to their name in your chat list, you can invite them to download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in from the Video & more menu in a chat window. Even if your friend doesn’t have a video camera, you can still make a voice call or a 1-way video call.

As someone who has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours helping large enterprises transition to the latest and greatest collaboration and messaging tools, I’m constantly impressed with the way the Google builds and implements products.  But enough about infrastructure; it’s not nearly as cool as the end results.  See the screen shots below.

Google and uptime

For a relatively small outage that Google had a few months ago, they sure did get a lot of press.  As Google responded, “Over 1 million business customers” have come to expect 100% up-time and flawless service from Google, so I guess it should not have been a surprise that blogosphere lit up during this interruption.  It certainly set the stage to for a great discussion around up-time and reliability.  

Let’s take a deeper look at the reality of what Google provides; the chart below from the Radicati Group documents average downtime as experienced by business for several enterprise messaging systems on a monthly basis.  It’s clear that the traditional on-premise approach is at least an order of magnitude less reliable than Gmail.   

I am not one to be swayed by reports & averages, and real world experience trumps any marketing hype or consultants research, in my opinion.  In this light, we setup our own enterprise monitoring solution that tracks Google on a regular basis.  

The charts below are from monitoring our own internal Google Apps Gmail over the last few months. Keep in mind, this is actual production data, not just a simple “ping” of gmail.com.  These results are based on successful log-in actions via an automated script, performed every minute from no less than 12 internationally dispersed servers that intelligently check for full Gmail availability.  

 

If you look at things in even more detail, you can see that not only is Google delivering on the SLA, they provide a great user experience.  See the response time graph below; this is the amount of time that it takes for the login process to occur.  Google is providing sub-second response time over this entire same period.  How long does it take you to login to your current on-premise mail system?