LogMeIn previews AppGuru

INDIA: LogMeIn Inc. announced a preview of AppGuru, the company’s new product specifically designed to help IT professionals embrace, secure and manage the rapid influx of business and employee-introduced cloud applications in the workplace – apps that have been adopted with little or no IT involvement.

Built to help IT pros redefine their strategic role in today’s cloud-centric work environment, AppGuru’s identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) features are designed to centralize the management of users in the cloud, thereby easing the onboarding and off-boarding of employees, while providing a single tool for setting and enforcing policies for business and personal productivity cloud apps.  As a result, IT pros can encourage and even empower the widespread use of such apps, while mitigating potential inherent data loss and compliance risks.        

As business applications move to the cloud and new, employee-introduced cloud apps take hold in the workplace, the nature of and need for identity management is changing.  A December 2012 study conducted by Edge Strategies on the bring-your-own-app (BYOA) trend found nearly 70 percent of companies reported active use of employee-introduced cloud apps at work.

According to the findings, only 22 percent of IT pros indicate they are fully prepared to handle BYOA and 43 percent are concerned with the lack of control over these apps. In addition, SaaS enterprise apps (e.g. Salesforce.com), are often controlled by line-of-business owners, thus putting traditional IT tasks such as provisioning and policy control in the hands of business users outside the IT department.

AppGuru is aimed at addressing the management challenges caused by this new dynamic by introducing an approach to cloud based identity management – or IDaaS – that centralizes management and control while providing an alternative to the disparate, ad-hoc and often error prone process of procuring, configuring and deploying cloud applications into a business environment.