Monday, November 21, 2011
Today we shipped Centrify Express 2012 — our comprehensive suite of free Active Directory-based integration solutions for authentication, single sign-on, remote access, file-sharing, monitoring and cloud security for cross-platform systems. It is another milestone release in terms of added functionality (more on that below) and new platforms supported (with nearly 50 new OSes added!). It is also marks the milestone that well over 100,000 IT Pros have acquired Centrify Express in the last 12 months alone.
Some of the new functionality now available in Centrify Express 2012 includes:
- Updates to Centrify Insight. Centrify Insight is a unique application powered by Splunk delivering out-of-the-box dashboards, reports and analysis for UNIX and Linux users' identity, authentication and authorization data. Centrify Insight 1.1 specifically adds the ability to monitor and report on *NIX user login activity for Active Directory and local users, successful/failed login attempts, and login methods including SSH, telnet and su (switched user).
- Nearly 50 new platforms added. DirectControl Express 2012 adds new support for HPUX 11.31, AIX 7.1 and nearly 50 additional platforms to its current broad UNIX, Linux and Mac support. Using Centrify's CloudTools, automated Active Directory join capabilities continue in DirectControl Express to enable deployment of DirectControl Express in the cloud.
- Update to Centrify DirectManage Express. DirectManage Express automates the discovery of systems, assesses their readiness to join Active Directory, and streamlines the deployment and integration with Active Directory. Serving as the central management point, the solution now adds the ability to upgrade and update Centrify managed servers to the latest release of Centrify Express, or to the full Centrify Suite. DirectManage also enables administrators to centrally manage local accounts and groups on Linux, UNIX and Mac systems whether or not those systems have been joined to Active Directory. Administrators can also create, edit or delete local accounts and groups on a single system or a group of systems.
- Updates to Centrify Open Source Tools. Centrify Express offers pre-packaged open source tools, and with Express 2012 has updated its pre-configured versions of OpenSSH to the latest release OpenSSH 5.9p1 for secure, remote access and file-sharing in an Active Directory environment. Centrify-enabled OpenSSH is not required, but provided as an option for customers and guarantees support for GSS Key Exchange on all platforms to establish trust between hosts (a feature which is not part of the standard OpenSSH distribution) and allows users to have the most current and consistent version of OpenSSH across their various deployed Linux platforms.
Plus some other great features!
One final comment: that statistic of over 100k users acquiring Centrify Express in the last year alone is particular gratifying as I have read that other free interoperability solutions took over 3 years to match this 100k adoption of Centrify Express, thus indicating that Centrify Express has the clear leadership and momentum in terms of user adoption. If you couple this user adoption with the positive head-to-head reviews and the fact that it offers more functionality and more to upgrade to than alternative solutions, now you know why we proudly say that Centrify Express is in fact the #1 solution for Active Directory integration. But hey, don't believe me, try it today for yourself.
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Tom Kemp is CEO of Centrify. You can follow him on his Centrify blog or his Secure Thinking blog on Forbes.com.
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