* Centrify Express is 'designed to improve security and compliance of data center and desktop systems'
Gartner’s recent CIO survey places identity management as the No. 1 security priority through 2011. That’s the good news. The same survey also indicates that spending on solutions will be down, however. Fortunately, I guess, vendors are doing what they can to make it easier for you to acquire the identity services you need.
Centrify recently announced a set of free apps and tools, content resources and community forums which, according to PR virtuoso Bryan Grillo, are “designed to improve security and compliance of data center and desktop systems.” This now means, again according to Grillo, that “…businesses of all sizes can leverage Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to establish a single sign-on experience for Linux and Mac users.”
The new offerings, which are a subset of the Centrify Suite and collectively known as Centrify Express, comprise:
* DirectControl Express — Enables Linux and Mac OS X servers and workstations to participate in an Active Directory (AD) domain and gives users AD-based single sign-on.
* DirectManage Express – Automates deployment and management activities by providing a central solution to discover non-Windows systems on a network; assess and validate the system’s ability to join AD; download the right packages for systems; and automatically deploy software to join systems to AD.
* Centrify-Enabled Open Source Tools and Utilities — Allows for cross-platform connectivity and file sharing with Centrify-enabled versions of OpenSSH, PuTTY and Samba that have been enhanced and tested to seamlessly work with AD and support Kerberos while delivered as easy-to-install pre-compiled packages.
* Centrify Express Community — An online social network that fosters learning, collaboration and best-practice development in support of single sign-on and related security and compliance initiatives.
Centrify Express is a subset of the capabilities provided by the Centrify Suite, which are fully usable on their own. Centrify Suite enables additional capabilities such as group policy, role-based access control as an industrial-strength replacement of sudo, privileged identity management, user-level auditing, server isolation and encryption of data-in-motion. Centrify Express customers can simply use Express for free or subsequently upgrade some or all of their non-Microsoft systems to various editions of the Centrify Suite that meet their needs.
Sounds like a “can’t lose” proposition to me.
