Staying current: Merit Medical Systems and Symplified

Expansion planned

The deployment of Symplified's solution at Merit was faster and went even more smoothly than Cannon anticipated, and, he says, the company's support has been highly responsive when needed. “I'm pleased with Symplified, particularly because it extends identity management and SSO to any mobile platform without having to manage software on each device.”

The solution touches all of Merit's sales and marketing personnel, its distributors and portions of other divisions throughout the company. Cannon says that as the company continues to expand, it is likely to extend deployment of Symplified to more employees – and perhaps to customers.

“Symplified transforms access management integration projects into simple online service activation,” says Platt. “The solution also integrates with existing identity stores on a company's network, eliminating the need to replace or migrate user repositories. Unlike traditional access management technologies, with Symplified there is no software to install, manage or update.”

Further, deploying cloud applications presents a significant intellectual property protection and compliance challenge for enterprises. “Symplified enables IT departments to set and enforce access control policies on business data that resides outside the enterprise in third-party data centers,” says Platt. “Symplified natively integrates with hundreds of cloud applications, and more are continually added. If an application used by an organization is not currently available, Symplified offers integration services to add new cloud services to its catalog.”

These sorts of rapid updates have become essential in today's burgeoning market for mobile devices. According to Gartner, 46 percent of the world's mobile phones will be smartphones by 2013. And, Platt says, Symplified addresses this growing market by delivering identity and access management to any mobile device. 

Smartphones and tablets present unique security risks, and Merit has implemented measures to give additional protection to the data should a device be lost or stolen, says Cannon. “We have the ability to remotely wipe a device, and cloud applications tend to store less information on the device than do native applications.”

The cloud is becoming the new operating system, and mobile devices are becoming its dominant user interface, Cannon adds. Consequently, companies like Merit face the challenge of extending security and compliance policies to cloud applications accessed on various mobile devices. 

“Symplified greatly eased our transition to the cloud, and it enables us to extend to any mobile device without installing and managing software on each device,” he says. “This ensures Merit will continue to operate from a position of advantage in our highly competitive market.” 

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INGREDIENTS: SSO for mobile

Lincoln Cannon, director of marketing technology for Merit Medical Systems, says that by using a proxy architecture, Symplified manages security on traffic flowing to and from cloud applications to deliver the following services:

Centralized authentication and access control linked to Active Directory.

Security policy enforcement on cloud applications, without exposing identity information outside the firewall.

Single sign-on “SSO” to all authorized applications, including via mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and laptops, for a more secure and efficient user experience.

Federated SSO between SAML (Google) and Non-SAML (eLeap) applications which facilitates mashups between cloud applications.

Audit and reporting of cloud application usage for compliance.

This article originally appeared in an SC Magazine Mobile Spotlight. To download a PDF of the issue, click here.