1 Introduction
Cayosoft is a small privately held company based in Columbus, OH, USA. It was founded by a veteran team that had previously worked at Quest Software on Active Directory and Identity Management products. In 2013, they have decided to establish their own company with a focus on Microsoft hybrid infrastructures to provide a unified management interface instead of a multitude of native on-premises and cloud management tools offered by the company.
As Microsoft continues pushing their identity and access management services to the cloud, this essentially means that the daily jobs of IT departments become twice as complicated. Although businesses are embracing cloud services as an easier and cheaper alternative to on-premises infrastructures, the majority of enterprises still need to keep their identity stores on-premises for security, compliance or operational reasons. These hybrid environments introduce additional challenges, because administrators must manage several disconnected systems with different security models and management tools, set up complicated synchronization processes, etc.
Although Microsoft puts a lot of effort into introducing new management tools for their cloud services, the legacy tools for managing on-premise environments are traditionally limited to command-line utilities and scripting tools. Needless to say, this has created a large market for 3rd party solutions to address this lack of convenient management tools, and this market is really crowded. However, many of these tools, while offering more productive and convenient alternatives to existing native tools, suffer from the same inherent limitations.
Cayosoft addresses these challenges by building upon a unified extensible architecture that doesn’t make a distinction between on-premises and cloud components and instead focuses on delivering native support for hybrid environments. By providing a unified management interface for on-premises and cloud identities and services and eliminating the complexity of native syncing and scripting tools, Cayosoft Administrator can provide substantial reduction for administration effort and help desk costs for organizations of any size.
Back in March 2016, when we have reviewed the fourth major release of Cayosoft Administrator, the general verdict was positive, noting its unified management, administration, reporting and self-service functionality for both on-premises Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange, as well as several Office 365 services. However, at the time, no support for several widely used services like SharePoint was offered. The company’s small partner network and limited presence outside of the US market was another challenge.
Two years later, following the recent release of Cayosoft Administrator v5, we are revisiting the product to see how the challenges mentioned above were addressed, as well as to analyze new capabilities and recent business developments.
The most notable new capability in the version 5 is full support for Microsoft’s public cloud services, including SharePoint, OneDrive and even Teams. With this, Cayosoft can finally cater the needs of Office 365 customers that have already fully embraced the cloud. After seeing major growth in subscription base last year, the company has finally decided to expand to the European market, introducing its first localized UI, as well as the number of features to address the EU GDPR requirements.
