Centrify Automates Cloud Security for Enterprise Private and Public Clouds

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- VMWORLD -- Centrify Corporation, the leader in securing and auditing access to cross-platform systems and applications through Active Directory, announced enhancements to its Centrify Suite software to provide enterprises the ability to dynamically secure Linux-based cloud servers using their organization's established Active Directory infrastructure. The Centrify Suite enables customers to take control of their cloud hosted servers and automatically ensure consistent security policies are enforced across hosted systems. This "enterprise-out" approach to access control centralizes the administration of security policies and helps make all of their servers, whether private or hosted, as secure and compliant with regulations as those in their data center.

"The enterprise-out approach is favored by organizations that are looking to leverage investments in policy logic residing with Microsoft AD, such as role definition expressed through group membership and entitlements, to manage access control to off-premises services and infrastructure," noted Steve Coplan, senior analyst at The 451 Group.

The Centrify Suite addresses some of the key security challenges that organizations face when using cloud-based servers. The advantage of the Centrify approach is that it establishes Active Directory as the center of trust between cloud and enterprise systems to provide:

• Control — Centrally maintain security policy enforcement for cloud servers to ensure consistency and compliance by integrating cloud-based servers into established security infrastructure regardless of the operating system or location
• Role-based access and privilege control (RBAC) — Dynamically provisioned cloud servers can be immediately accessed by authorized users
• Hardened Security – host based security that protects the operating system, applications and data-in-motion and is location and network independent
• Visibility — monitor and audit all user activity with scheduled and customized reporting options to provide auditors the required records of any privileged access to sensitive systems
• Enterprise Single Sign-on (SSO) to the operating system and applications

To enable this capability, Centrify is delivering new capabilities in the Centrify Suite that uses the VMware vCloud APIs (see related press release: "Centrify Enables Enterprise-Out Security for Applications hosted in VMware vCloud™ Director Environments") and/or Amazon EC2 APIs to discover servers in the cloud. The Centrify software then analyzes the readiness of the servers to be joined to Active Directory, downloads the appropriate software, joins the systems to an organization's Active Directory domain and provisions privileged users according to a customer's established policies. Additionally, Centrify takes advantage of "Cloud templates" that define the configuration and deployment of servers so that organizations can easily enforce standards on new systems as they are provisioned.  Centrify provides a deployment guide on its website.

In addition, leading managed service providers such as Savvis are using the same Centrify technology to offer virtual private data center services to enterprise organizations.

"The ability to dynamically provision servers requires at the same time the ability to dynamically secure them," said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing at Centrify. "By securing and managing all of their servers within Active Directory, IT organizations can leverage their Active Directory investment to ensure that policies are uniformly applied wherever they are needed."

Availability

The ability to centralize control of cloud based systems and applications, to enforce the enterprise's security policies on hosted servers and to establish trusted server relationships is available now in the Centrify Suite. The capability to dynamically establish these controls leveraging vCloud and Amazon EC2 API support will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010.

About the Centrify Suite

The Centrify Suite centrally secures cross-platform data centers through Active Directory-based identity and access management of the industry's widest range of heterogeneous systems, hypervisors and applications. Built on an integrated architecture that leverages our patented technology, the Centrify Suite of solutions include integrated authentication, access control, role-based privilege management, user-level auditing, and server protection solutions. The components of the Centrify Suite consist of Centrify DirectControl, Centrify DirectAuthorize, Centrify DirectAudit, Centrify DirectSecure, and Centrify DirectManage.

About Centrify

Centrify is the leader in securing and auditing access to cross-platform systems and applications through Active Directory. From the data center and into the cloud, Centrify's identity consolidation and privilege management solutions are used by over 2500 organizations to reduce IT expenses, strengthen security and meet compliance requirements. For more information about Centrify and its solutions, call +1 (408) 542-7500 or visit www.centrify.com

Centrify, DirectControl and DirectAudit are registered trademarks and DirectAuthorize, DirectSecure, DirectControl Express and DirectManage are trademarks of Centrify Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other product and company names used in this document may be trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE Centrify Corporation