Today, we announced the preview program for AvePoint Perimeter – a new mobility solution that ensures business critical Microsoft SharePoint assets are accessed by trusted users, within trusted locations, on trusted devices.
One of the coolest things about AvePoint is that a lot of the work we do starts with our own business needs, and we are always asking an important question about our own products: Would we use this? As a software company developing new innovations, we look at what’s already available in addition to what our customers, partners, and employees need to solve their own collaboration challenges. And that’s exactly where AvePoint Perimeter started. Rather than use high level buzzwords such as Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), the best way for me to describe AvePoint Perimeter is to talk about the business challenges it helps solve.
Multi-Factor Authentication
The first use case, and the most obvious one, is providing multi-factor authentication (MFA). Traditionally, MFA has involved 2 of 3 things:
· Something you know (username, password, PIN, code, email address, etc.)
· Something you have (a token, a device, a card, an assigned code from another party, etc.)
· Something you are (aka "Biometrics" such as a retinal scan or fingerprint)
All three factors have well established uses when it comes to access control. AvePoint Perimeter adds the next factor to MFA by adding in location-based controls and moving away from authentication and into remote access functionality.
Location-based controls have generally resided in the network and remote access areas, and are most familiar to virtual private network (VPN) and proxy administrators. Content owners and administrators generally do not have control over where users come from and relied on network administrators to control that capability. In the past, two different types of solutions were required to enable both bring MFA and location-based controls. Add a directory or traditional authentication – such as Active Directory – into the mix and you’re juggling a lot of solutions in order to ensure your content is secure.
AvePoint Perimeter looks to solve this challenge by allowing an organization’s existing authentication to work in conjunction with workers’ mobile devices to ensure they are accessing content allowed to them not only based on their credentials but also by where in the world they are accessing it.
Short-Term Access to Content
Another important use case is to providing a way to allow "short-term" access to content without requiring a set of credentials. In other words, if you need to give someone access to a document, but don’t want to go through the trouble of creating a local account and can’t justify setting up Federation for a single document for an outside user, you can now use their mobile device as a trusted authenticator. The end-user can be given permission to enroll their device with AvePoint Perimeter, and then the device would allow them to access the content you are sharing. However, there are no usernames or passwords involved, so there is no set of credentials to get compromised later on.
In both of these use cases as well as others, AvePoint Perimeter works with the existing environment. It does not replace infrastructure, but instead provides additional options for existing platforms, starting with SharePoint. At present, AvePoint Perimeter supports iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) as well as most HTML5 compatible browsers (including current versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox).
Interested in joining the customer preview program for AvePoint Perimeter? Enroll now on AvePoint.com and see if you qualify!
