Why Centrify

More Cost-Effective

Centrify DirectControl seamlessly and easily integrates non-Microsoft systems and applications with your existing Active Directory infrastructure, delivering significant cost savings over older, more complex solutions.

Identity management is among the top security challenges facing IT departments today. Corporate officers are requiring IT personnel to closely manage, control and audit who has access to what key systems and applications — not only to make their IT environment more secure but also to address compliance requirements. Existing identity management products try to address this challenge by synchronizing data across identity stores. These highly complex and proprietary products are costly to deploy and often require painful changes to an existing IT infrastructure.

Centrify's vision and approach are different. Our solution integrates heterogeneous systems and applications into a secure, connected computing environment with Microsoft Active Directory at its center. Active Directory is a standards-based, enterprise-class directory that most companies already own. Centrify enables you to leverage that investment in Active Directory to manage more of your enterprise and remove silos of identity, thereby making identity management not only simpler but more cost effective.

More Secure

Centrify's patented Zone technology is a "must have," providing the industry's only solution for using Active Directory to manage identities, grant access rights and delegate privileges across a diverse mix of UNIX, Linux and Mac computers and devices

Centralizing user account management in Active Directory eliminates common security exposures, such as the existence of orphan accounts and the proliferation of usernames and passwords that your end-users need to remember. But you still need to bring the systems into Active Directory in a way that preserves existing security boundaries: you can't have users that should only have access to engineering systems logging into your HR systems. Centrify's Zone technology leverages the power of Active Directory's group-based management mechanisms to provide even more granular access control within your mixed environment.

Seamlessly Integrated

DirectControl's integrated architecture is easy to deploy and provides an easy-to-manage foundation for all components of the Centrify Suite

DirectControl delivers a single, all-in-one Agent — designed for and delivered as a native executable for each platform — that in effect turns a UNIX, Linux or Mac server or workstation into a full Active Directory client. Additional Suite components, including DirectAuthorize, DirectAudit, and single sign-on modules for SAP and web applications — snap seamlessly into the DirectControl Agent, which handles all Active Directory interaction. The result: a unified installation, licensing and configuration scheme that makes DirectControl and the entire Centrify Suite by far the easiest to deploy and manage.

Non-Intrusive

DirectControl works out of the box with existing systems and applications without forcing you to make intrusive changes

A key design goal for DirectControl is to snap seamlessly into your IT environment without forcing you to make changes to the underlying infrastructure. For example, unlike many other solutions that integrate with Active Directory, DirectControl does not install any software on domain controllers, nor does it require any changes to the Active Directory schema to store UNIX identity data.

Other solutions also force you to make intrusive changes to your environment, such as undergoing a painful pre-deployment project to re-assign all users a single ID. In contrast, Centrify's Zone technology makes account migration quick and painless by enabling you to associate an Active Directory account with the multiple identities that a single user may have — without schema extensions. Some customers view this as a long-term solution; others see it as an interim step that gives them time to conduct an orderly migration to a one-person-one-ID policy which Centrify also fully supports. You choose; we support either scenario.

The Leader in Systems and Application Support

DirectControl offers the broadest range of operating system, application, and third-party support.

DirectControl provides a single solution for more than 400 operating system versions, including not only Solaris, Red Hat, AIX, HP-UX (including Trusted Mode) and SUSE, but also Mac OS, VMware and Debian. This includes support for an extensive array of both 32- and 64-bit systems. DirectControl also supports the most popular J2EE and web application servers: Apache, JBoss/Tomcat, WebLogic and WebSphere. DirectControl is also unique in providing robust integrated support for the Open Source Samba file server.

In addition, to simplify deployment and accelerate your productivity, the Centrify Resource Center delivers the industry's broadest set of free downloads of Open Source tools such as OpenSSH and PuTTY that have been enhanced to work seamlessly with Active Directory via DirectControl. The Resource Center also provides documentation that helps you quickly configure commercial products such as AttachmateWRQ Reflections to work with DirectControl.

The bottom line is that no other vendor matches this lineup of operating system, application and third-party support.

Part of an Integrated Solution for Unified Identity Services

The Centrify Suite provides Unified Identity Services for workstations, on-premise and cloud-based servers across UNIX, Linux, Windows and Mac OS by leveraging your existing identity infrastructure investment — Microsoft Active Directory. With Centrify Suite organizations gain control and establish visibility across heterogeneous systems through integrated authentication and single sign-on, policy management and authorization, auditing and analytics and server isolation and encryption. Built as a single architecture, Centrify Suite — consisting of DirectControl, DirectAuthorize, DirectAudit, DirectSecure and DirectManage — allows organizations to improve operational efficiency and strengthen security and compliance by consolidating islands of identity and centrally managing privilege and policy.