Bitium
Simplifying Identity Access Management in the Cloud

With the ongoing consumerization of IT, corporate IT departments are outpaced by the proliferation of cloud-based apps in the marketplace and even faster adoption of these applications by the customers. Based in Santa Monica, CA, Bitium helps companies gain that control, without hindering employee adoption of the applications they need to be more productive. “We help businesses manage all of their web-based applications—Google Apps, collaboration tools, CRM, social networks and marketing tools, in one place. We tightly integrate with Google Apps in order to make on-boarding and off-boarding of employees simple. Once a user logs into Bitium, they gain the proper access to a myriad of other applications as well,” says Scott Kriz, Founder and CEO, Bitium.

The Bitium solution allows Google Apps administrators the ability to manage all their business’ apps users and groups from a single location, leveraging the Google Apps user directory. Once installed, users and groups will automatically sync from Google to Bitium, eliminating the need to manage two separate directories to enable and revoke users and access to various business applications. Bitium also empowers administrators with a powerful new way to securely manage every SaaS app used across the organization. They can grant or revoke an employee’s access simply by clicking a checkbox on their administrative dashboard. Group managers can also serve as administrators within Bitium and grant entire teams or a whole department access to a suite of software tools.

Bitium’s service includes a powerful suite of analytics that monitor their customers’ software usage making it easy for administrators to discover popular new software and quickly make it available across the entire organization. Through Bitium, IT administrators have access to insights, reports, audit logs and details on app spend. This helps to manage IT costs by not paying for apps that are seldom used and to consolidate accounts and cut costs in instances where various departments have independently signed up for the same app.

“At Bitium, our lifeblood is integrations with other applications,” states Erik Gustavson, CTO and Co-Founder, Bitium. With over 4,000 app integrations, Bitium has added a capability for customers to request applications and has created a process for getting the applications integrated within a maximum time-frame of 48 hours. Customers can also give access to their applications to new employees directly from their existing system. “For example, adding a user to a specific Google group in the Google Control Panel can now provision an employee into applications like Salesforce without ever requiring the employee to log into Bitium or Salesforce,” explains Gustavson.

Bitium solution’s ease of use is highlighted at Prialto, a provider of turnkey administrative services. Their staff and clients rely heavily on more than 200 powerful third-party web-based applications, like Salesforce, Google Docs, and Dropbox. As a result, finding a sensible password sharing strategy became a major focus for Prialto and their customers. Using Bitium, Prialto has eliminated these complicated and unsafe practices. Central administrators manage the Bitium system and authorize only the appropriate productivity assistants to have access to a particular client’s Salesforce, email or other shared accounts. This enables Prialto’s staff to keep clients’ schedules, CRM systems and email accounts organized on their behalf without ever seeing the clients’ passwords.

For Kriz, who continually raises the bar on achievements and gravitates onward to the next goal, it is imperative to constantly track and keep abreast of the trends in primary identity and multifactor authentication.

Bitium’s vision is focused on not locking down access, but instead they want their corporate customers to embrace as many useful apps from multiple software vendors. Bitium’s research and development efforts are focused on providing developers with a way to more deeply integrate their cloud applications with one another in ways not possible today.