Centrify Ships Centrify Suite 2012; Offers Unprecedented Control and Auditing Over User Access to Cloud and On-premise Systems

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of security and compliance solutions that centrally control, secure and audit cross-platform systems and applications using Active Directory, today announced the general availability of Centrify Suite 2012, the latest release of its security and compliance solution in use at 3,500 organizations today.  Centrify Suite 2012 delivers innovative, new enterprise-class capabilities to centralize privilege access management as well as audit user session activity for increased security and compliance of cloud and on-premise systems.

The new features in Centrify Suite 2012 empower enterprises to easily centralize identities to cross-platform systems and establish secure, privileged user access across UNIX, Linux and Mac environments.  An integrated solution, Centrify Suite 2012 — consisting of DirectControl 5.0, DirectAuthorize 2.0, DirectManage 5.0, DirectAudit 2.0 and DirectSecure 1.2 — enables secure authentication, single sign-on, privileged access management and user session auditing for the broadest set of platforms and applications.  See Centrify's news on DirectAudit 2.0 announced today at: http://www.centrify.com/news/release.asp?id=2011092001.

Other unique capabilities in Centrify Suite 2012 such as Hierarchical Zones and Computer Roles make it the easiest and most scalable solution for consolidating complex UNIX and Linux identity environments into Active Directory, and logically managing relationships between users, groups and computer roles in a cross-platform system environment.  Other unique capabilities include extending DirectAudit's historic focus of delivering user session auditing of UNIX and Linux systems to also include complete full fidelity capture of Windows sessions.

"We have high end servers and databases running finance and HR applications, and we need to secure and audit access to them in order to stay compliant with SOX," said Scott Griffith, Senior Unix Administrator at Consolidated Communications.  "Centrify simplifies manual processes and centralizes our authentication through Active Directory.  With Centrify Suite 2012, the enhanced Zones capabilities allows us to easily automate the assignment of access privileges based on roles, so individuals get only the appropriate level of access that they need for their job function.  Centrify Suite 2012 also audits and reports on all user and role-based activity, allowing us to show that we are on top of things — which makes it a lot smoother during our audit reviews."

"The majority of successful security breaches are caused through some type of administrative mistake," said Neil MacDonald, Gartner Vice President and Fellow.  "Centrally managing access control for cross-platform systems across various silos simplifies security and compliance efforts and reduces the chance for misconfiguration.  Organizations need consistent, centralized access policies across their physical and virtualized systems as well as private and public cloud computing environments."

New functionalities now available in Centrify Suite 2012 include:

• Improved centralized management of complex and disparate UNIX and Linux systems – building upon Centrify's patent-pending Zoning capability, Suite 2012's unique Hierarchical Zone capabilities support inheritance and individual overrides of attributes.  The end result is that enterprises can even more quickly migrate their UNIX and Linux identities into Active Directory without requiring UID/GID clean-up and rationalization, a painful process which often puts project success at risk.  Suite 2012 reduces cost and complexity of controlling and managing UNIX and Linux systems by consolidating identities into Active Directory's proven, robust and scalable identity framework.
• Authoritative "least-access" model for privileged users – Using the new Hierarchical Zones feature in combination with the newly introduced Computer Roles capabilities, Suite 2012 mitigates insider threats by enforcing a least access model to systems and applications, ensuring staff have only the access rights and privileged commands required for their job function.  This reduces business risk and streamlines IT operations with a delegated administration model that strictly enforces separation of duties and dictates who is authorized to grant and manage administrator privileges on systems or groups of systems.  This capability extends Centrify's role-based access control (RBAC) solution to both users and computers.
• Real-time auditing of privileged user sessions on Windows, UNIX and Linux systems – provides a full accounting of user activity and system access.  DirectAudit's detailed logging of historical user activity establishes accountability and strengthens compliance reporting by showing which users accessed what systems, what commands they executed, with what privilege, and what changes they made to key files and data.  For more information, see today's companion press release at: http://www.centrify.com/news/release.asp?id=2011092001
• Simplified replacement of legacy NIS infrastructure and NIS migration with an Active Directory-centric management solution – Suite 2012 reduces operational costs and dramatically improves compliance by removing an inherently unsecure and unsupported NIS infrastructure.  Enterprises can simplify ongoing management of netgroups through Suite 2012's Computer Roles and Active Directory Groups.
• Rapid deployment and improved administration of non-Windows systems with new DirectManage capabilities – Suite 2012 improves operational efficiency by rapidly discovering, configuring and joining new systems and updating existing systems.  This simplifies integration with existing management tools and processes through improved command line administration supporting automation and scripted management.
• Expanded platform coverage – Only Centrify supports more than 300 platforms with the largest and most experienced staff dedicated to supporting the broadest set of platforms and applications.

"With the shift to cloud-based computing, organizations are turning to Centrify to secure and audit access for their increasingly heterogeneous infrastructures that spans from the internal data center to the public cloud," said Centrify CEO Tom Kemp.  "Centrify pioneered the approach of painlessly allowing organizations to 'do more with less' by extending their existing Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure to secure and manage cross-platform environments without having to make intrusive changes to their infrastructure.  With Centrify Suite 2012, it's even easier for organizations to consolidate disparate identities into Active Directory and get privileged users to login as themselves (versus sharing privileged accounts), provide controls over what those privileged users can do, and verify all their activity regardless of the system or application."

Pricing and Availability

Centrify Suite 2012 is available today from Centrify and authorized partners worldwide.  The Centrify Suite is licensed on a per server basis and starts at $385 per server and $65 per workstation.

About Centrify

Centrify delivers integrated software solutions that centrally control, secure and audit access to cross-platform systems and applications by leveraging the infrastructure organizations already own — Microsoft Active Directory.  From the data center and into the cloud, more than 3,500 organizations, including 40 percent of the Fortune 50, rely on Centrify's identity consolidation and privilege management solutions 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 http://www.centrify.com/.

Centrify, DirectAudit, DirectControl and DirectSecure are registered trademarks and DirectAuthorize and DirectManage are trademarks of Centrify Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Contact:
Dan Spalding
[email protected]
(408) 960-9297

SOURCE Centrify Corporation