Cobalt Iron Compass Enterprise SaaS Backup Platform Provides Security Assertion Markup Language Integration

Cobalt Iron Inc. announced that its Compass enterprise software-as-a-service backup platform offers support for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an XML-based, open-standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties.

Through the SAML integration, customers  have the convenience of managing user provisioning and authentication securely from their preferred third-party identity providers.

This integration makes Compass a SAML service provider, with all provisioning taking place outside of Compass in the identity provider’s interface. This improves customers’ security and user administration in several ways.

First, it removes the responsibility from Compass for storing each customer’s authentication credentials, with the identity provider acting as the single source for sensitive user authentication information. Plus, with provisioning activities managed solely by the identity provider, customers experience time and cost savings. Administrators no longer have to spend time provisioning Compass users that are already covered in the identity provider’s software, which means zero time spent dealing with yet another password in another system for each user. The benefits carry over to end users, who no longer have to complete another login form or change a password to access Compass. Saved from having to create yet another password for another system, users have reduced risk that their accounts will be compromised or their identity stolen through phishing schemes.

“As our existing and newly onboarded Compass customers have expanded their use of identity providers, we’ve added integration with SAML to give them even greater convenience and security,” said Paul Linder, product development manager. “By enabling seamless login to Compass from third-party identity providers, the SAML integration allows administrators to bypass the time-consuming task of creating new users and assigning them to groups manually and one by one. It’s just the latest development in our ongoing evolution of Compass to reduce the pain and increase the ease of backup administration.“