WSO2 App Manager provides IT with robust identity and access management and life-cycle governance for mobile, Web and cloud apps; fosters user compliance via an intuitive, socially enabled app store
Mountain View, CA and London, UK – June 2, 2015 – In an increasingly connected world, enterprises need to manage and ensure secure access to the applications employees rely on—whether via the Web, on the cloud, on their local desktops, or on mobile devices. To address this demand, WSO2 today announced the availability of WSO2 App Manager, the industry’s first 100% open source software to provide a unified approach for securely managing an enterprise’s applications across multiple platforms. WSO2 App Manager was launched in conjunction with WSO2Con Europe 2015, WSO2’s eighth user conference, which runs June 1-3, 2015 at the Park Plaza Victoria in London.
WSO2 App Manager is designed to provide unified management of all enterprise application types, starting with Web, cloud, and mobile apps in version 1.0.
“In today’s connected world, we work on multiple mobile applications as well as collaborate via Web and cloud apps. However, too many organizations have separate groups managing these different apps, leading to complexity and inconsistent policies. Meanwhile employees taking advantage of bring-your-own-device policies are provisioning mobile apps from public sources, introducing security risks and version control headaches,” said Isabelle Mauny, WSO2 vice president of product management. “Our fully open source WSO2 App Manager provides enterprises of all sizes with the secure, unified application provisioning and governance enterprises need while creating an easy, intuitive experience that fosters end-user adoption.”
WSO2 App Manager addresses the emerging market for “workspace aggregators” that bring cohesiveness to the application provisioning, management and security policies, which typically have been managed by diverse groups within an organization.
According to the Gartner report, Market Guide for Workspace Aggregators1, ”Organizations are modernizing their application portfolios by investing in platform-independent applications, but a portfolio of different types of applications will coexist. A growing part of the working population will be mobile. An individual will use three or more devices to accomplish personal and business tasks, in a variety of locations and networking conditions. Workspace aggregators can provide a single overarching framework to manage such complexity, adjusting security and management policies dynamically in any context, presenting the relevant portion of a workspace at any time and preserving the experience of a unified workspace.”
Robust Identity Management for Mobile, Web and Cloud Apps
With WSO2 App Manager, organizations can now provide enterprise-class identity and access management across new mobile apps, as well as their Web and cloud applications.
Central to WSO2 App Manager is a robust Identity Provider based on the functionality of WSO2 Identity Server, which has been implemented by enterprise customers worldwide, and is in deployments managing millions of user identities. The Identity Provider reduces identity provisioning time, guarantees secure online interactions, delivers a single sign-on (SSO) environment via the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, and supports federated identity management.
WSO2 App Manager also features an Entitlements Manager, which provides administrators the ability to control access to Web applications, resources and data. It accomplishes this through fine-grain policy-based access control based on the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). To facilitate identity management, WSO2 App Manager integrates with popular enterprise user repositories, including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) based products and Microsoft Active Directory.
Controlled App Provisioning, Consumer-Like User Access
WSO2 App Manager 1.0 enables controlled provisioning, management and analysis of Web-based apps residing on enterprise servers; software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, such as Salesforce.com; and mobile apps running on Apple iOS, Android, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. The key components of WSO2 App Manager are App Store, App Publisher, and Web App Gateway; it also supports capabilities for robust analytics.
App Store provides a collaborative Web interface for end users to self-register, discover apps, subscribe to apps, and evaluate them. It features a graphical consumer-like store where users can browse apps by provider, tags or name, as well as rate and comment on apps. Role-based access means users see only the applications they are allowed to use. It also gives users a central location for accessing Web and SaaS apps via single sign-in and single sign-out.
App Publisher offers IT professionals a collaborative Web interface for publishing apps to internal users along with external consumers and partners, sharing documentation, and gathering feedback on the quality and usage of applications. Users can govern the complete app life cycle, from creating to publishing or rejecting, deprecating and retiring an application, as well as manage multiple app versions and deployment status by version. App Publisher also provides the ability to apply security policies to applications, including authentication and authorization; associate applications available to system-defined service tiers; and easily handle administration of resource-based access to an enterprise subscription. Immediate publishing is possible with one-click deployment to the WebApp Gateway.
WebApp Gateway is the runtime backend component that intercepts application requests and applies policies, such as throttling and security checks. Upon validation, it passes Web application calls to the backend. WebApp Gateway also is instrumental in gathering application usage statistics. Notably WebApp Gateway is based on WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus, which enterprises around the globe use to process anywhere from millions to billions of service calls per day.
An Analytics Framework within WSO2 App Manager handles all application usage data published to it from WebApp Gateway. This framework is pre-integrated with WSO2’s analytics software and offers out-of-the-box support for Google Analytics, providing the ability to view metrics by user, application and more. It also allows IT professionals to create their own analytical apps to gain insights into the applications provisioned through WSO2 App Manager. Additionally, reporting engines can be plugged in to deliver customized reporting.
Proven Scalability, Flexible Deployment
WSO2 App Manager is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the award-winning WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all Carbon-based WSO2 products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses proven core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities.
Significantly, WSO2 App Manager offers proven scalability in a 1.0 product, since it uses the same core technologies and runtime of WSO2 Carbon already being used by enterprises around the world.
Additionally, the componentized architecture maximizes the flexibility enterprises have when deploying WSO2 App Manager.
Availability and Support
WSO2 App Manager 1.0 is available today as a software download that can run directly on servers; on cloud platforms such as, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), OpenStack, and VMware VSphere; or on top of WSO2 Private PaaS. Additionally, customers can choose to have WSO2 host WSO2 App Manager through the WSO2 Managed Cloud service. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.
WSO2 App Manager is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStartSM consulting program, development support, and production support.
1Gartner, “Market Guide for Workspace Aggregators,” by Federica Troni, Nathan Hill, Terrence Cosgrove, and Mark A. Margevicius, January 2, 2014, refreshed May 28, 2015.
About WSO2
WSO2 delivers on the promise of the connected business with the only completely integrated enterprise platform that enables businesses to build, integrate and manage their APIs, applications, and Web services on-premises, in the cloud, and on mobile devices. Leading enterprise customers worldwide rely on WSO2’s award-winning 100% open source platform and its robust governance and DevOps functionality for their mission-critical applications. Today, these businesses represent nearly every sector: health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology, telecom and more. Visit https://wso2.com or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook..
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