Member Article

Government Innovation agency selects Secure Cloudlink

Secure Cloudlink, a patented cloud services brokerage (CSB) that uniquely eliminates the risk, cost and frustration of using passwords as a means of identification, has been selected by Innovate UK. The challenge posed by Innovate UK was to integrate and secure all of the organisation’s internal applications, including Salesforce and Office 365, whilst providing all users with a single point of access through a branded marketplace.

Innovate is the UK’s innovation agency with a staff of 375 working with people, companies and partner organisations to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy. Innovate UK selected Secure Cloudlink due to its ability to integrate all applications and to provide a Innovate UK branded, centralised marketplace for users to request and access all applications and services.

The user experience for Innovate was significantly enhanced due to the personalised desktop, which specifies and orders all the cloud services employees have access to. All applications are accessed via a single sign-on (SSO) experience, which removes the frustration of setting and remembering login names and passwords by the user. Users are now able to request access to new applications via the marketplace from an administrator, set by Innovate internally.

Secure Cloudlink is the only platform that anonymises user identities over the web for secure access to cloud services. Its patented technology does not store, replicate or transmit user security credentials when connecting Innovate UK’s internal users to web-based applications, making the system impossible to breach through password hacking. Other benefits of Secure Cloudlink include consolidated and granular reporting, including application usage to ensure license compliance and optimisation and who is accessing what application and at what time.

Rob Gaskin, of Secure Cloudlink, explains: “A common issue that organisations face today is that it’s impossible to use the same password across multiple applications and services due to different format requirements. Users often use similar passwords and never change them, or to write them down. This means security is compromised. The usability challenges have escalated due to more complex requirements for ‘password strength’, and the introduction of one-time-passcodes as a second factor ‘secret’ that requires two passcodes every time they authenticate.

“With Secure Cloudlink, however, all of a sudden users have gone from having to have numerous passwords memorised to not having to remember any at all and simply log in to all their permitted applications from a single point. Secure Cloudlink includes a comprehensive single sign-on experience but, as importantly, eliminates the need for passwords to authenticate users ‘behind the scenes’ where user credentials are vulnerable to attack which could lead to a system security breach, “ Gaskin concluded.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Super User .