Cyber-Ark’s Growth Mirrors Expansion of Enterprise Identity Management

Recent security breaches in France and Canada exasperate the executives at Cyber-Ark, a privileged identity management solutions supplier in the Oracle Extended Identity Management Ecosystem. So much so, that in both cases Calum Macleod, Cyber-Ark’s European director, has gone to the press with strongly written editorials and has himself become an expert source for other writers.

Why go on the record? “As a company we find it amazing the amount of breaches of the magnitude that are happening are still happening,” explains Alan Bird, vice president of business development. “We have technology, that if implemented correctly with the correct best practices, stops that stuff from going on. Whenever we see something this big that has that kind of an impact, it’s hard not to say something.”

Cyber-Ark was at Oracle OpenWorld in November 2007 demonstrating Enterprise Password Vault (EPV) 4.5, the latest version of its flagship productthat provides power features to streamline the management, integration and performance of administrative and application accounts and identities.

“One of the things we’re really proud of here is that most of our enhancements in our product have been customer-driven enhancements,” says Bird. “So we’ve evolved and developed a version of the Enterprise Password Vault that’s aimed at the application space. That was really the highlight of the 4.5 announcement, as well as broader support for Oracle.”

Thanks to “easy to guess” application identities and hard coded passwords, users often can sign on to an application without anyone knowing who that person is or what they are doing. The 4.5 release of Enterprise Password Vault locks those credentials down. Cyber-Ark will randomize and change the credential for the application on a policy that customers define. Then as the application runs it asks for that credential from Cyber-Ark’s data store and its able to use it. In the end, the application credential is the only thing that can use that application.

This recent demonstration highlights the success of a relationship that began after OpenWorld 2006. In April 2007, the company officially became part of the Oracle Extended Identity Management Ecosystem, a partnership that Bird credits as being a springboard to increased business. Cyber-Ark, which now has 350 global customers, has grown 70 percent year over year the past two years, and is on track to do that again this year. 

Bird predicts the industry – and Cyber-Ark -- will only continue to grow.  “I think you’re going to see more proactive engagement of companies in fixing the overall security issues around privileged identity and highly sensitive information then how we have in the past,” he says. “I believe Cyber-Ark will continue to be the thought leader and the market leader. Seventy percent year over year sound aggressive, but I think we’ll do that and probably more. Oracle is one of our key partnerships and we are making a lot of investment in it.”

Cyber-Ark is currently working with Oracle to develop eight scenarios that showcase how Cyber-Ark can leverage its vaulting technology into the solutions that Oracle takes to market. This has benefits for both partners. “From an Oracle point of view, it’s a way to extend and improve what they already offer with Database Vault,” says Bird. “It’s a way to allow customers to do database consolidation and have security and audit over who’s accessing those databases, and how and why.”