Strata integrates identity and access management capabilities with Azure

The prevalence of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments among enterprise customers creates a complex situation for security, particularly identity verification and access management. Strata, a Boulder, Colorado-based startup that launched in 2019, provides identity orchestration solutions and recently received the Security Software Innovator of the Year award from Microsoft.

MSCloudNews reach out to find out more about their work in the Microsoft channel, technology alignment, and new security management technology standards.

Integrating with Azure Active Directory

Eric Olden is co-founder and CEO of Strata. He and his fellow founders are former Oracle executives—and avid surfers—which is why the company chose to name its first product Maverics, after an area in California with the largest waves in the continental US (though the product is spelled slightly differently). “We saw that as symbolic of the big wave that is happening in technology right now,” he said.

The company set out to address identity and access issues that enterprise customers face when they move to multiple clouds, for instance with workloads spread across AWS, Azure, and private clouds.

When you start to have more than one cloud, you have multiple points of identity that need to be managed…[Our] software allows customers to move their apps to different clouds without re-writing or refactoring. A big area of opportunity with Microsoft is modernizing these enterprise workloads and allowing them to move off a legacy Oracle implementation. [Customers are able to] modernize to use Azure Active Directory. We do with software what would take over half a million dollars and six months of manual effort.

According to Olden, the process of modernizing an app to Azure AD with Strata takes as little as a few minutes. The company has built off of its initial use case with identity for Azure AD to support joint customers with Microsoft.

[We’ve] expanded through close partnership with Microsoft to include other areas of integration of our product and the Microsoft suite. Now you can use some of the more advanced tools like Defender or risky user technology to identify which users are coming into an app based on these other signals we pull from Microsoft to make contextual decisions. If we see a user displaying risky behavior we could with our software say a password is not enough and require a biometric [login] instead. We’re now using more of the Microsoft data and advanced security tools to make the experience more secure for users. We make that very seamless so that the user journey is as seamless as possible.

The path forward

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