Additional Resources on Migrating from NIS/NIS+ to LDAP

Thursday, April 17, 2008

On April 23rd for North America and on April 24th for Europe we are hosting a free Network Information Service (NIS) Migration webinar that explains how Centrify DirectControl can enable you to leverage your existing Active Directory-based LDAP and Kerberos infrastructure to replace NIS with a solution that meets regulatory requirements and streamlines your IT infrastructure and operations in the process.

Why migrate from NIS? Obviously Sun Microsystems' NIS has been the primary choice for managing UNIX identity information in a networked environment for many years. But unfortunately, NIS has several shortcomings in the areas of security, manageability, and network dependency, and its successor, NIS+, was never widely accepted as a standard. Increasingly, NIS has proven unable to pass stringent security guidelines for user account management and access control, both from a simple IT best practices perspective and from a regulatory compliance perspective.

This fact, combined with Sun's in "end-of-feature" announcement from NIS+ and its focus on migrating customers off of NIS to LDAP has prompted corporate security and compliance managers and IT administrators to look for a solution to replace NIS with a solution that is secure, manageable, and cost-effective. We happen to think Active Directory is the best "end destination" for a number of reasons. And we, and many of our 400+ enterprise customers who have migrated off of NIS using our technology, believe that Centrify DirectControl offers the best solution for migrating from NIS to an Active Directory-based LDAP and Kerberos infrastructure. Our solution not only includes tools to migrate user account information from NIS databases into Active Directory, but a robust NIS Server that enables UNIX admins to securely store, distribute, and deploy NIS maps through Active Directory on a wide range of platforms.

Besides this upcoming webinar, Centrify offers these additional resources on migrating from NIS to Active Directory:

• NIS Migration and Interoperability technical chalk talk - this video provides an overview of NIS and explains the benefits of using DirectControl's NIS service to manage UNIX identities centrally through Active Directory.
• NIS Migration whitepaper - this white paper examines the challenges of migrating NIS deployments to a central repository, and explains in detail how a combination of Microsoft Active Directory and Centrify DirectControl can deliver a cost-effective solution that strengthens security while improving IT efficiency.
• Migrating UNIX Directories to Active Directory whitepaper - this white paper discusses how customers can migrate existing UNIX directory systems to Active Directory using the Centrify DirectControl suite and Centrify's unique Zones technology.
• NIS Migration the Centrify way blog post - discusses how customers can deploy Centrify DirectControl to de-commission their NIS infrastructure and move to using Active Directory as the central directory identity store for not only their Windows environment but their thousands of UNIX and Linux systems as well.
• Technical documentation on our secure support site - between our "Planning and Deployment Guide" and our "Administrator's Guide" we offer approximately 100 pages of technical user documentation on how to enable a NIS to LDAP migration.

Enjoy the webinar!

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3-Part Webinar Series What Gartner Says About Using Active Directory for Centralized Authentication, Auditing and SSO

By integrating non-Microsoft systems with Active Directory, Centrify helps organizations comply more confidently with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, because enterprise security policies can be enforced across all of their distributed systems equally.

Michael Dortch
Principal Business Analyst
Robert Frances Group