Each of these options must be able to stand up to external threats such as Advanced
Persistent Threats (APTs), ad hoc hacking and former employees, along with internal
threats such as protection against fraud from internal employees. Also, the solution
must not sacrifice user convenience or the ability for employees to participate in the
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon.

So, which of the four "roads" can stand up to all potential threats without sacrificing
user experience?

Open Access is the easiest to implement, since it doesn't involve doing anything,
but it doesn't deliver the required security measures. Behind the VPN seems like an
obvious choice, however it's inconvenient for users, who have to go through two login
steps to access the application. It doesn't scale well to BYOD, since it requires VPN
clients to be deployed to a wide range of different personal devices. Native Strong
Authentication would work great, but is quite inconvenient, with each application
requiring its own, specific security solution.

Federated Identity Management is an ideal choice. According to a recent Gartner
study, Federated Identity Management is less than two years away from mainstream
adoption.

There is a reason for this. It has some very strong plus points for these types of depl-
oyments, such as:

* Flexibility of different authentication methods
* No requirement to install on end user devices
* Centralized audit record of which applications were accessed by which user,
and when

For organizations aiming to mitigate risk both internally and externally, without
sacrificing employee convenience, federated identity management is the best way to
address data moving to the cloud: not only with SaaS applications, but also with
internal apps which are stored elsewhere. It gives users a single location to access
the applications they require to do their jobs, and gain access to the far flung data
those applications own.

What type of solution is your organization implementing to ensure data stays secure
in the cloud?