Identity is one of the biggest problems on the internet right now. Not only do people not know where all their accounts are across the web, they often store the passwords to those accounts in files, emails, or on paper.

Companies like Ping Identity, Okta, and others are coming out of the woodwork to try and solve this issue of identity, particularly for enterprises that often have employees signing into a number of different applications throughout the day. Those companies don’t want login credentials — the gateway to their data — just lying around. And they often want to be able to manage and shut off access to certain accounts when needed.

Passwords are now getting the brunt of the blame for weak login security. VentureBeat chatted with Ping Identity’s chief executive Andre Durand to talk about the biggest needs in identity, if the passwords needs to finally kick the bucket, and what companies can do to manage employee accounts. Durand has three steps to a more secure online identity:

1. Companies need to separate “identities” from applications
2. Companies need to get rid of passwords all together
3. Companies need to focus on and enforce their own standards, or policies

Check out the video for more:

Video via livex.tv

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

PepsiCo does not plan on moving its systems public cloud. Yet.

Frank Edwards, the director of IT strategy at PepsiCo has been working on the “Exit Strategy Group” at the global food and beverage giant. The group looks at how to bring operating costs down and make PepsiCo’s backend as efficient as possible. And he doesn’t think the public cloud fits that mold.

“We haven’t seen that it’s compelling to be less expensive or to fit our risk profile,” said Edwards at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “If you have a compelling case that will save us a million dollars, that’s not really compelling enough.”

PepsiCo takes in $65 billion in revenue a year.

In order to come to this conclusion, Edwards and his team used the Monte Carlo Simulation, which took over 40 billion different situations in which PepsiCo could save money through the public cloud, and found that it just didn’t make sense.

“I’d love to see more companies adopt this kind of mechanism when selling to large enterprise,” said Edwards. “It does seem like a lot of messages are geared toward the developer or SMBs [small to medium sized businesses].”

Edwards said that PepsiCo believes that it won’t last forever as a private cloud company, however.

“The public cloud is eventual, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he said.

In order to prepare for that, the company has purposefully built its data centers near Amazon and other cloud providers so that it can physically hook up to them if need be.

For an enterprise company like PepsiCo, the public cloud really makes sense for product launches and other unpredictable events. PepsiCo likes to work with public cloud vendors when it has various promotions or product launches so that it doesn’t have to deal with the resulting traffic spikes.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Companies know mobile is invaluable and inevitable. But despite 41 percent of IT professionals fearing external handheld devices, they are moving forward into the mobile enterprise.

According to a survey by Symantec, enterprises officially understand that “application culture” isn’t going away, and in order to succeed they need to be competitive both online and in the App Store. Both the iPhone and Android have significantly altered a phone’s function, making it a productivity tool, as opposed to a simple mode of communication. Currently, 71 percent of enterprises are either looking to, or are actively deploying their own mobile applications.

The expectation is that this kind of technology in the workplace will, in fact, increase productivity — every company’s desire. But Symantec makes the point that most technology implementations don’t get the return on investment they’re hoping for. That is, the cost of implementing outweighs the resulting benefits. But for mobile devices, where 70 percent of companies hope to see more employee productivity, 77 percent actually do see it. The use has become so sticky in the workplace that 59 percent of employees are now reliant on their phones for industry-specific applications.

While mobile may be warming up on IT executives, and presenting itself a new and necessary component for working, 41 percent of survey takers see mobile as a top three IT risk. These professionals are constantly concerned with lost or stolen devices, data breaches, misuse of proprietary information, malware, and a number of other issues. Indeed, the annual cost to an enterprise-level company for mobile “incidents” and upkeep is $429,000. For small businesses, that number exists around $126,000. For small companies that aren’t even profitable yet, that may be a big chunk of change.

“Mobile devices are legitimate endpoints that require the same attention given to traditional PCs,” Symantec’s report states.

For this reason and others, 48 percent of companies say integrating mobile is “extremely challenging.” Symantec suggests that this high percentage of those experiencing extreme challenge is due to wider-spread deployments. Where mobile was once used on a departmental basis, more companies are swinging toward blanket-mobile-policies and are distributing devices or accepting personal devices in workforces as a whole.

Symantec surveyed 6,275 companies in 43 countries for this report, touching North America, Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. IT and c-level employees were contacted specifically.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Businessman image via Shutterstock