Cayosoft Administrator v5

Cayosoft is a privately held company based in Columbus, Ohio, founded in 2013 by a team with prior experience at Quest Software building Active Directory and Identity Management products. The company’s premise is that Microsoft’s shift to cloud-based identity and access services makes IT operations harder in practice, because most enterprises still keep identity stores on-premises for security, compliance, or operational reasons. Hybrid environments therefore force administrators to operate across disconnected systems, different security models, complicated synchronization, and a mix of cloud tools and legacy on-premises utilities that often rely on command-line and scripting.

Cayosoft Administrator is positioned as a “natively hybrid” management platform that removes the on-premises vs. cloud divide by offering a unified, extensible architecture, consolidated administration, and consistent security roles and policies across environments. It replaces multiple native and legacy tools with a unified interface for Active Directory, Exchange, and Skype for Business on-premises, plus Azure Active Directory and Office 365 in the cloud. The solution includes a web console for day-to-day administration and self-service, and a Windows application for advanced configuration such as rules, workflows, scopes, and delegation. Core capabilities include role-based security, rule-based administration built on an abstraction layer, automation without PowerShell via hundreds of out-of-the-box rules/workflows, bulk operations, and unified reporting/alerting.

Version 5 adds full support for major Office 365 services, including SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, enabling “cloud-only” use cases through a packaged Office 365-focused edition. License management and analytics are emphasized as a popular value driver, along with GDPR-oriented features to support European expansion. Key limitations remain: no managed SaaS offering, limited localization, and primarily English-language support.

• Cayosoft is a privately held company based in Columbus, Ohio, USA.
• The company was founded in 2013 by a team that previously worked at Quest Software on Active Directory and Identity Management products.
• Cayosoft Administrator v5 supports SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams in addition to other major Office 365 services.
• The product can be installed on-premises or in Microsoft Azure as a virtual machine.
• There is no managed SaaS offering for Cayosoft Administrator.
• The solution includes a web console for daily administration and self-service functions such as password resets.
• A separate native Windows application is used for advanced operations like managing rules/workflows and configuring scopes and delegations.
• Cayosoft Self-Service is estimated to reduce help desk calls by up to 50%.
• The licensing model includes a free tier for organizations with fewer than 200 users.
• Support for Amazon Web Services has been announced.

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “Cayosoft addresses these challenges by building upon a unified extensible architecture that doesn’t make a distinction between on-premises and cloud components.”
• “Built upon a unified extensible architecture, it provides a ‘natively hybrid’ approach towards management of complex hybrid environments.”
• “Easy automation without scripting tools like PowerShell.”
• “Runbook automation is an additional powerful function that replaces complex scripting with a graphical tool for creating complex workflows with multiple steps that can be later executed with a single click.”
• “Office 365 License Management seems to be one of the most popular features among the company’s customers.”
• “The platform’s architecture is compatible not just with Microsoft’s products, but with any 3rd party service that provides an appropriate management API.”
• “Since all the complexity of the actions happening behind the scenes is hidden from administrators in predefined workflows, there is no longer a need to employ a team of highly qualified experts.”
• “Cayosoft Administrator can provide substantial reduction for administration effort and help desk costs for organizations of any size.”