Cloud Identity now provides access to traditional apps with secure LDAP

In October at Next ’18 London, we announced a secure LDAP capability that lets you manage access to traditional LDAP-based apps and IT infrastructure using either G Suite or Cloud Identity, our managed identity and access management (IAM) platform. Today, we’re excited to announce that secure LDAP is now generally available.

Unifying SaaS and LDAP app management

While software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps continue to grow in popularity, many organizations still rely on the legacy LDAP protocol to authenticate traditional applications and IT infrastructure. With secure LDAP, you can now manage access to SaaS apps and traditional LDAP-based apps/infrastructure, hosted on-premises or in the cloud, using a single identity and access management platform.

Secure LDAP enables authentication, authorization, and user/group lookups for LDAP-based apps and IT infrastructure. Secure LDAP uses the same user directory for both SaaS and LDAP-based applications, so people can use the same Cloud Identity credentials they use to log into services like G Suite and other SaaS apps as they do to log into traditional applications. Applications and IT infrastructure that use LDAP can be simply configured to leverage Cloud Identity’s secure LDAP service instead of an existing legacy identity system—end users don't have to change how they access their apps.

Another benefit is that you can now manage applications and users in one place. Unifying the management of SaaS and LDAP apps with Cloud Identity helps decrease complexity and cost for your IT teams, reduce the dependency on legacy identity infrastructure such as Microsoft Active Directory, and improve security with a single place to set up identity and access policies.

Select customers have already been using secure LDAP in their environments. For example, Doctor On Demand is using secure LDAP to allow their admins to access Jamf Pro, and Utility Warehouse is using secure LDAP to enable access to PaperCut for simplified print management. We’re also working with the following companies to ensure that their apps are compatible with secure LDAP: Aruba Networks (HPE), Atlassian, itopia, JAMF, Jenkins (Cloudbees), OpenVPN, Papercut, pfSense (Netgate), Puppet, Softerra, Sophos, Splunk, and Synology. Virtually any app that supports LDAP over SSL can work with secure LDAP, and we are actively working with additional companies to validate more apps.

Getting started

Secure LDAP is now being gradually rolled out to customers using Cloud Identity Premium, G Suite Enterprise, G Suite for Education, and G Suite Enterprise for Education. To get started, check out the documentation or visit the Cloud Identity website to start a free 14-day trial.