An Introduction to IAM Cloud - Forum Sponsors

[IAMCloud_DanielJennings]

Hello Edugeek!

 

We’re very excited to be sponsoring the Office Software forum, but why this forum I hear you ask…well, the whole reason IAM Cloud came into existence back in 2011 was to support Microsoft in migrating universities and colleges from Live@Edu over to Office 365, and providing automated licensing, provisioning and SSO to Office 365 without the need for ADFS or Dirsync.

 

Since then we’ve continued to provide supporting cloud services for Office products as well as developing our advanced identity platform that helps organisations all over the world to manage identity and access for their users, as well as migrations for emails and files.

 

We now provide 2.5 million Office 365 authentications worldwide, are a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner and were the Microsoft Worldwide Education Partner of Year 2015. We’re also the largest Microsoft Azure deployment in Europe.

 

So, how can we help? If you’re facing any barriers to utilising Office 365 products in your establishment we’ve the experts and solutions to get you going. From Active Directory Migration to turning your OneDrive & SharePoint libraries into Mapped Drives - we’ve a whole host of very affordable solutions that can support you achieve your goals.

 

If you have any questions, or need some help with anything Office software related, feel free to pm me or any of my colleagues that you see on this forum.

 

You can find out more about what we do here: https://www.iamcloud.com/

 

Speak soon.

Edited October 3, 2016 by IAMCloud_DanielJennings

[FN-GM]

Do you provide the software to map network drives to Google drive yet please?

[tj2419]

Same question as above, eagerly awaiting a google drive mapping product.

[FN-GM]

Also do you provide an enterprise level product that will sync to and from Google Drive and SMB shares please?

[IAMCloud_DanielJennings]

Hi. This is something that has been on our roadmap for a while. Unfortunately this work won't be completed for up to three months, but if there is evidence of high demand for this then the power of demand could probably push this up our priorities list.

 

Is anybody else out there looking for something similar?

[mikkydoos]

How about the same for OneDrive ?

 

E.g. Over a terabyte across several mapped drives.

 

We want as close to real time sync in both directions.

Edited October 3, 2016 by mikkydoos

[BKGarry]

I'd just like to chime here and say that I have been using IAMcloud for years here.

 

They are always there to help, and I cannot fault them. They have helped solve group sync issues, licensing fun, user removal and lots of other things.

 

Their support team is excellent and are always there to offer advice, they even do Google integration with SSO. Pity we didn't use it in the end due to Google Classroom not doing custom URLs to SSO then.

 

I could not do the failover in house that they offer for us

[snagrat]

I too use it at a number of schools and can highly recommend it.

[gshaw]

Not been such a great experience for us after signing up with them this summer. A word of warning if you have an existing Microsoft Azure AD sync (DirSync) setup iamcloud doesn't seem to work unless they take all those duties over, which is a bit odd as other hosted SSO providers just deal with the federation side and are happy to leave user provisioning alone if required.

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Not been such a great experience for us after signing up with them this summer. A word of warning if you have an existing Microsoft Azure AD sync (DirSync) setup iamcloud doesn't seem to work unless they take all those duties over, which is a bit odd as other hosted SSO providers just deal with the federation side and are happy to leave user provisioning alone if required.

 

Hey gshaw, sorry to hear the experience hasn't been so great for you. I will feed this back into the team. We obviously didn't communicate that detail properly to set the right expectation, so I'm really sorry about that. Despite getting off on the wrong foot, I hope you're able to make the most some of our features all the same.

 

For anyone who's interested - I can explain why our platform takes over duties from Dirsync. Unlike quite a few other SSO/federated identity solutions, ADFS+Azure AD for example, IAM Cloud handles authentication/federation in the cloud. This means there are no dependencies on being able to talk to your Active Directory to authenticate users. This means that if you have network, server or firewall issue on-premises, IAM Cloud is still able to let your users access all their cloud services. It's a major benefit for a lot of our education customers. In fact, we specifically designed our platform this way because our early customers preferred it like this, and I think it makes sense if you're wanting to make the most of the cloud.

 

Of course, handling authentication/federation in the cloud means that we have to handle the provisioning in the first place - and not just negotiate the authentication with an on-prem directory (like AD). But again, being able to get rid of ADSync/DirSync, and allow IAM Cloud to handle provisioning instead, has been a major plus point for a lot of our customers.

 

The approach we've adopted here also works well for alumni users. With IAM Cloud, you can remove your alumni from AD (to stop the ever increasing clutter), but still offer them ongoing digital services like email, library access etc, because we're still handling it in the cloud. This means alumni users still get a nice SSO user experience, and we also take the burden of password resets off your support desk with our self-service reset feature. Pretty cool if building closer relationships with your alumni is important to your institution.

 

- Oh and responding to the question above on Google Drive integration with Cloud Drive Mapper. Yep, it's in progress, so watch this space

[mikkydoos]

How about the same for OneDrive ?

 

E.g. Over a terabyte across several mapped drives.

 

We want as close to real time sync in both directions.

 

 

Is that a no ??

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Is that a no ??

 

Hi, just had to read through the thread... Ok, so no, Cloud Drive Mapper isn't currently a sync tool. It's a drive mapping tool, that allows you to create drive letters for different OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online end points. It gets around the issues of file sync, like not being practical on workstations that have multiple users. And it's powered by rules, so different groups of users can access different drives, as you would expect with Group Policies and network storage. It also works with IAM Cloud's SSO (or ADFS if you'd prefer), so users get a nice seamless experience when they move between machines.

 

As mentioned above, we are creating Cloud Drive Mapper for Google Drive. So you will soon be able to map drives to Google (as well as Office 365), and we are working on expanding this out to other end-points, and we're working on Mac support too.

 

One of our end goals is to allow hybrid drives across network storage and cloud, but with a simple consolidated view for users, as a network drive. This would allow organisations to make use of the speed of network storage and the volume of the cloud. But being honest, we've got quite a bit of a journey to get here.

 

Any feedback on what you folks would like here would be useful though.

[mikkydoos]

Thank you for the clarification @IAMCloud_Leon

[jmak]

The drive mapping is great for users and a hybrid solution probably wouldn't be noticed most of the time for most users. For me, the two advantages of a hybrid solution are business continuity in the event of loss of internet connection and speed of access to large files when on site. The same would apply to user authentication - if a site loses internet connection, are users still able to log on?

[IAMCloud_Leon]

The drive mapping is great for users and a hybrid solution probably wouldn't be noticed most of the time for most users. For me, the two advantages of a hybrid solution are business continuity in the event of loss of internet connection and speed of access to large files when on site. The same would apply to user authentication - if a site loses internet connection, are users still able to log on?

 

No, it would be like a network issue affecting your network drives, no connectivity means no access. Of course, if your Internet is down across a whole site, then you're likely going to have bigger issues to think about. Having said that, if someone were already working on a file locally when an outage struck then it would be fine though. They'd just be able to push it back up to the cloud store when your connection was back online.

[MYK-IT]

Some clarification relating to this: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07823744/insolvency may be useful to existing, and potential new customers of your product / service; especially from a support point of view as I am under the impression that the current company is IAM Cloud Technology Ltd; whereas previously it was IAM Cloud Limited.

 

I mention this as 'IAM Cloud' was one, of a few potential solutions we have been researching.

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Some clarification relating to this: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07823744/insolvency may be useful to existing, and potential new customers of your product / service; especially from a support point of view as I am under the impression that the current company is IAM Cloud Technology Ltd; whereas previously it was IAM Cloud Limited. I mention this as 'IAM Cloud' was one, of a few potential solutions we have been researching.

 

Hey! To be transparent and give you a clear picture of this. We have entered into a CVA - basically a repayment agreement to pay a tax bill owed this year over the next 18 months. The HMRC were happy with this, and it has now been fully resolved. But it is unfortunately classified as a form of insolvency to do this, which admittedly doesn't look great. The reality is that we have grown by nearly 70% this year and are in a strong financial position. To address your second point - we are still IAM Cloud Limited. The reason for the creation of the company IAM Cloud Technology Ltd is unrelated to the CVA and is connected to a growing alliance we have with another organisation. I can't give too much information on that the moment, because nothing has been officially announced, but it will be very positive for our customers and our business overall - so we're pretty excited about it! I will be happy to update you as required on progress. Feel free to email me directly on [email protected] if you'd like more information or to be kept up-to-date. Hope this is helpful and clears up some of the confusion. Cheers!

[jmak]

No, it would be like a network issue affecting your network drives, no connectivity means no access. Of course, if your Internet is down across a whole site, then you're likely going to have bigger issues to think about. Having said that, if someone were already working on a file locally when an outage struck then it would be fine though. They'd just be able to push it back up to the cloud store when your connection was back online.

I was more responding to your query:

 

 

One of our end goals is to allow hybrid drives across network storage and cloud, but with a simple consolidated view for users, as a network drive. This would allow organisations to make use of the speed of network storage and the volume of the cloud. But being honest, we've got quite a bit of a journey to get here.

 

Any feedback on what you folks would like here would be useful though.

 

It would be useful My main reason for not recommending Google Drive at the minute is our dependence on a single internet link.

 

For the same reason, while the idea of someone else taking responsibility for user account creation and management is attractive, at this point it would feel like a step to far too loose the ability to authenticate on site.

[Paid_Peanuts]

+1 for Google drive support