In addition to the reasons I talked about in my previous post, there are other reasons that IIW2008b was a great conference for Vidoop. One of the major reasons is that exceptional progress has been made toward enabling web-based strong authentication to work in more places in the enterprise.

Eric Sachs, Google’s Security Product Manager, is leading the charge. He’s been rallying the strong auth stakeholders both inside and outside Google with the message that web-based strong auth for web-based applications is just around the corner. In fact, it’s mostly here today. Any enterprise with an interest in securing their Google Apps users, for example, via a stronger mechanism than the username/password option that Google provides need only implement a SAML provider, or buy one of the available commercial products.

What isn’t quite here today is the ability to use these strong authentication mechanisms outside the web browser and within the family of rich client applications that are built to work with Google Apps. The list of rich clients includes such things as the Blackberry email client or the Google Talk desktop client. But that’s likely to soon change as well with Eric and his team pushing to spread awareness of enterprise authentication requirements within Google. In order to show off the power and simplicity of moving the existing web-based mechanisms into desktop applications, they’ve built a prototype of a desktop application that makes use of a web browser to request authorization to access data in the cloud.

Seeing the prototype in action provides a powerful and tangible demonstration to Google insiders of how close their desktop applications are to working with the various and plentiful strong authentication solutions out there such as Vidoop Secure. Even more powerfully, it shows Google outsiders just how close their strong authentication needs are to being met even on SaaS applications.

We here at Vidoop are excited to see all of the great work that’s being done toward enabling strong authentication in more places, and welcome the opportunity to help secure your business’s life in the cloud.

You can see screencasts of Vidoop Secure in action in Eric’s strong auth video collection.