Recent Postings
Buckle Up With PCI ... It's Becoming the Law
A new Washington state law went into effect earlier this month that makes a business or a credit card processor liable for unauthorized access to credit card information it stores. The key thing with the law is that businesses or processors are not liable if they are PCI DSS compliant, so in effect this further motivates businesses who process credit cards to get compliant. This is part of a growing trend for states to in effect incorporate PCI into state law.
First New York Securities Integrates Linux with Active Directory the Centrify Way
I was pleased to see that one of our partners, TekVault, recently issued a press release re: a mutual customer, First New York Securities, who has deployed our software to help the customer manage and secure their fast growing Linux environment.
Periodically I like to report on how Centrify is doing for our customers and partners, as well as for prospective customers. Our Fiscal Year runs from July 1st to June 30, so we just ended our latest fiscal year and the final numbers have been tallied up. I have previously given a three month, six month and nine month update of the past Fiscal Year, so here is the “annual report”. And like the previous updates, after reflecting back on the achievements over the last 12 months, I am happy to say “Let the Wild Rumpus Start!”
Recently we announced Centrify Express, a free offering for anyone who wants to better integrate non-Microsoft systems with Windows. Please go ahead and visit www.centrify.com/express and download it — by simply entering a valid email address and you are on your way to cross-platform interop nirvana! We are very excited about this announcement as it delivers by far more free capabilities than any other Windows/Active Directory interop solution out there, and it is also the most mature and manageable solution out there. In this blog post I will discuss what Centrify Express is and why we released it.
Hardening VMware vSphere Security and the ESX v4 Console Operating System with Centrify
Recently VMware published its official release of the vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide. I was pleased to see that Centrify was the only third-party identity management vendor called out by VMware to "provide tighter integration with Active Directory" when it recommends to use a directory service product for authentication for the ESX Service Console. While Centrify was called out vis a vis the security requirements around Console OS password policies, in looking at the hardening guide it became readily apparent that the Centrify Suite can address a wide range of vSphere hardening requirements for enterprises, and this blog post gives an example of some of the additional value add Centrify can provide.
Comparing the NSS/PAM Implementations of Samba Winbind and Centrify for Active Directory Integration
Many of our customers want DirectControl to seamlessly integrate with Samba - the de facto industry standard CIFS File Server for Linux and UNIX - so I have blogged a few times about what we offer in terms of Samba interoperability as well as on the technical and architectural details around our Samba integration. But because there is a bit of overlapping capability with what Samba offers and what DirectControl offers, we occasionally get questions on how we compare to what Samba offers, so in this blog post I am going to drill down a bit into two areas of overlapping functionality with DirectControl and Samba's windbind capability.
Unified Identity Management - Research computing environments are often managed as independent silos, kept far apart from organizational and enterprise systems. Expect IT efficiency efforts and government reporting requirements to push for unified access control, single sign-on and identity management systems that span Windows, Mac and Unix systems. Companies with identity management systems built on Microsoft's Active Directory will want to take a serious look at software products from Centrify
Bio-ITWorld.com
January 2007