Centrify Suite 2012 Controls, Audits User Access to Cloud, On-premise Systems

Centrify helps organizations leverage Active Directory across heterogeneous platforms to quickly and effectively address compliance and mitigate risks from unauthorized access and insider threats.

Centrify Corporation, a provider of security and compliance solutions that centrally control, secure, and audit cross-platform systems and applications using Active Directory, has updated its security and compliance solution. Centrify Suite 2012 delivers 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 help enterprises centralize identities to cross-platform systems and establish secure, privileged user access across UNIX, Linux, and Mac environments. Centrify Suite 2012 is an integrated solution that consists of DirectControl 5.0, DirectAuthorize 2.0, DirectManage 5.0, DirectAudit 2.0, and DirectSecure 1.2. It enables secure authentication, single sign-on, privileged access management, and user-session auditing for a broad set of platforms and applications.

Other unique capabilities in Centrify Suite 2012 such as hierarchical zones and computer roles make it a 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. The suite extends DirectAudit’s historic focus of delivering user-session auditing of UNIX and Linux systems to include complete, full fidelity capture of Windows sessions.

New functionalities now available in Centrify Suite 2012 include:

Improved centralized management of complex and disparate UNIX and Linux systems, building on Centrify’s zoning capability. Suite 2012’s hierarchical zone capabilities support inheritance and individual overrides of attributes. The end result is that enterprises can 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 the 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 means that by using the new hierarchical zones feature in combination with the newly introduced computer roles capabilities, Suite 2012 can mitigate 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.

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. Centrify supports more than 300 platforms with the largest and most experienced staff dedicated to supporting the broadest set of platforms and applications.

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. Addition information is available at www.centrify.com/.

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