What the Analysts Say about Centrify

Centrify has been working with major analyst firms to evangelize our vision for securing cross-platform IT environments by leveraging Active Directory for centralized identity and access management. Here is a sampling of recent analysts from Gartner and other analysts, along with links to webinars and podcasts in which they have collaborated with Centrify to explore the business and technical benefits of leveraging Active Directory.

Gartner: Centrify's SaaS Single Sign-on Solution "Addresses a Very Real Customer Need"

Gartner recently said this about Centrify's SaaS capabilities in an Information Week article entitled "Centrify Harnesses Active Directory For Mobile Device Management"

Perry Carpenter, a research VP at Gartner, said in an email that his "initial thoughts about this announcement [Centrify SaaS support] are very positive." The new offering, he wrote, "addresses a very real customer need -- gaining greater control over SaaS -- while also offering proven strategies to simplify enterprise IT burdens."

Gregg Kriezman, also a Gartner research VP, expressed similar sentiments.

"The new products give an AD-centric shop a way to do [mobile device management] fundamentals," he stated in an email, "but they also have the authentication and SSO pieces." ... [and] when all the components [i.e. a customer looks at Centrify's entire product portfolio] are strung together, "you have something that's pretty nice."

Added Gregg Kreizman in another article:

"Mobile, cloud and social are disrupting and impacting identity to such a degree that it's forcing this once boring market [identity management] to become really interesting," Kreizman said. "However, it's still logical to build off of AD and leverage this tool that everyone has and is familiar with."

Kreizman also was quoted in this article

"Now, organizations need tools to extend user access and identity to everything, like Software as a Service (SaaS) apps and mobile devices, while still integrating with existing investments in Active Directory...It's still logical to build off of AD and leverage this tool that everyone has and is familiar with."

Sources

• "Centrify Harnesses Active Directory For Mobile Device Management" — Michael Endler, December 3, 2012
• "Identity access management boldly goes where Active Directory has not" — James Furbush, December 7, 2012
• "Identity and access management market faces identity crisis in cloud" — James Furbush, April 5, 2013

Gartner "Like(s) the Administratative Model Used by Centrify" for Mobile

Gartner analyst Mark Diodati sees the value in Centrify's tight Active Directory integration for its mobile device security solution:

"I like the administrative model used by Centrify for Mobile. It naturally extends Centrify's ability to manage heterogeneous devices via native Active Directory tools. Centrify provides an identity bridge that monitors Active Directory for changes, then feeds those changes to a SaaS-based service that abstracts the complexities of mobile device interaction."

Source

• "Commentary on Centrify's new MDM product" — Mark Diodati, Research VP February 19, 2012

Gartner: Centrify Is a "Right Vendor to Choose" for Active Directory Integration

Centrify's solution is "mature, technically strong, full featured, and possess(es) broad platform support.

Gartner is the leading IT analyst firm, focusing on the needs of Global 2000 enterprises. Gartner has recently begun to focus on what it has labeled "Active Directory bridge" products. Gartner concludes:

"Centrify's DirectControl product [is] being suggested for evaluation by those organizations looking for tight integration of their AD bridge and UNIX security products." … "Because Centrify provides a non-Windows administrative interface to enable the management of most AD bridge functionality from a web interface, this vendor will appeal to UNIX and Mac OS system administrators."

Gartner also sees the Centrify Suite as a strong UNIX security solution. Gartner noted the following about the Centrify Suite:

"[Centrify Suite delivers] tight integration of AD Bridge and UNIX security components (including Windows Group Policy); extensive bare-metal virtualization hypervisor support; excellent single sign-on (SSO) capabilities (via Kerberos); local PDP/PEP for high availability; event and keystroke auditing and reporting capabilities; and Mac OS X Server Support."

Sources

• "Active Directory Bridge Products: Getting More Value from the Windows Infrastructure" — Mark Diodati, February 2009
• "Providing a Strong Foundation: The Resurgence of UNIX Security Products" — Mark Diodati, Senior Analyst, June 3, 2009

Gartner Supports the Centrify Approach

Tools from ... Centrify can actually be more effective than sudo.

Ant Allan, Garner Analyst

Gartner is the most recognized name among IT analysts firms, and is particularly well known for its "magic quadrant" and "hype cycle" publications that try to provide structure and context for the various IT industry solution categories and solutions. No magic quadrant category exists for Active Directory-centric solutions for cross-platform identity and access management, but recent Gartner reports have called extending Active Directory to UNIX a "mainstream" industry approach. Some more examples:

"Using Active Directory for Unix administration and authentication reduces user repository complexity and simplifies the user sign-on experience."

Using Active Directory as an identity and authentication repository for Unix platforms is technically sound and can provide real benefits for end users and administrators.

"As the number of servers and applications to be managed increases, and multiple versions of UNIX operating systems must be supported, enterprises should strongly consider third-party solutions such as those offered by [Centrify]. These products use Active Directory as the unified repository for authentication information and constitute reduced sign-on solutions. Many of these products also extend the concept of group policy management to UNIX platforms. These tools help with the labor intensive aspects of rationalizing multiple UNIX host accounts with different user IDs and ID attribute syntaxes to a common scheme."

Sources

• "With Superuser Privileges Come Superuser Problems" — ServerWatch, November 10, 2009
• "Comprehensive Approach to Password Management and Single Sign-On" — Presentation by Gregg Kreizman, 2009 Gartner IAM conference
• "Active Directory and Unix Integration: Options for Reduced Sign-on and Administration" #00149425
• "Identity and Access Management Technologies Defined" #G00152051
• "Hype Cycle for Identity & Access Management Technologies, 2008" #G00158499
• "An Overview of Supplemental PC Life Cycle Management Tools" #00159527
• "Active Directory - Microsoft's Identity Hammer" — Presentation by John Enck, 2007 Gartner IAM conference

IDC Vendor Profile: Centrify's Growth "Insightful and Impressive"

Centrify is a company to watch because of its "established, proven record of accomplishment" in the IAM space.

IDC's Sally Hudson has written a vendor profile titled "Centrify Private Vendor Watchlist Profile: Bridging Linux/Mac/Mobile Platforms for Increased Security and Managed Access Control via Microsoft AD." The study concludes that Centrify is a company to watch because of its "established, proven record of accomplishment" in the IAM space. Hudson notes that:

"Centrify's ability to grow out and expand its product line to meet the emerging needs of the customer has been insightful and impressive. Centrify has successfully identified existing and emerging customer pain points, such as management, audit, and PIM, and focused on delivering appropriate solutions."

She also notes that Centrify's solutions will appeal not only to organizations that need "integrated identity management and granular access control solutions in mixed AD/Linux/Mac/mobile environments," but also to "cloud service providers as they look for ways to host and provide services to a wide variety of industries with compliance and audit regulatory mandates."

• Read the Profile

What Other Analysts Say

Here is a sampling of publications by other analysts writing about Centrify and its solutions.

"Centrify bears out its name, with ever-increasing unification of management for a huge list of platforms, as well as SaaS. Its range of mobile management options, in particular (device, app and container), continues its versatility. And its main selling feature is that it makes everything work with Active Directory as the center."

The advantages of being Centrify-ed: platform, mobile and SaaS ID management

"The Centrify recipe is simple: make the tools you already count on more productive by extending their reach and capabilities. Centrify layers its authentication, access control and auditing sauce on top of ubiquitous Active Directory to make this happen. This makes Centrify one of those rare companies that figured out how to add a whole lot of additional value without a lot of ripping, replacing, re-architecting or training."

"Centrify's DirectAudit fills an important role in securing systems from insider threats and demonstrating compliance to auditors. By tying UNIX and Linux system auditing into the established Microsoft management environment, Centrify further centralizes the administration of security and auditing in a way that increases the robustness of both."

• Enterprise Strategy Group White Paper: Centrify Adds Value to Active Directory — And the Business

"For enterprises using or considering Active Directory deployments, Centrify's DirectControl Suite can enable compliance and deliver high levels of business benefit and ROI."

"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."

• Robert Frances Group White Paper: Using Microsoft Active Directory to Address Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance in Heterogeneous Environments

"Centrify's solution helps make it possible for IT organizations to cost-effectively address compliance requirements across their heterogeneous environment in a manner that leverages their existing IT investments in technology such as Microsoft Active Directory."