IT organizations are being tasked with protecting sensitive data and corporate intellectual property in an increasingly borderless network environment. Retailers, for example, must move sensitive business data, such as customer credit card numbers, from far-flung branch offices to their corporate data center. Engineering firms are outsourcing development work to other countries, with highly proprietary intellectual property flowing back and forth. Businesses of all types are moving business applications onto virtual platforms or into cloud-based environments; frequently an organization's most business-critical applications are undergoing this migration because those are the ones that benefit most from the increased agility and lower cost afforded by these new technologies.
Many companies try to protect these data flows by moving them over leased lines, which are both expensive and provide no guarantee against hacker exploits. Moving data across the internet is appealing, but solutions for encrypting data in motion over these public lines are complex to configure in order to move data, for example, through corporate firewalls that rely on inspecting packets in order to do their job. They are also frequently involve expensive and hard-to-deploy hardware appliances at the endpoints, and frequently also require changes to the applications themselves.
With Centrify DirectSecure, some or all of the traffic between managed computers in a trusted zone can be optionally encrypted, providing protection from malicious network users who attempt to capture and interpret network traffic. The data flows from end point to end point through an authenticated connection, removing dependencies on firewalls and other edge systems. DirectSecure is a software-based solution that does not require additional appliances in order to work, and because it uses IPsec-based encryption, no changes are needed to applications.
Centrify DirectSecure thus provides organizations with a highly cost-effective and easy-to-deploy solution that enables them to use public networks for data transport without having to worry about it being intercepted and exploited.
The DirectControl MIIS Management Agent is a great example of how Centrify enables customers to get more value out of their investment in Active Directory and MIIS.
Michael Stephenson
Director
Windows Server Division
Microsoft Corp.