Centrify Suite Updates Windows Privilege Management Features

Centrify has released the 2013 version of its Centrify Suite security and compliance solution. Centrify Suite 2013 has been outfitted with new features around advanced privilege user management and auditing for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows systems, designed to help organizations more quickly meet compliance requirements and mitigate risks from threats affecting both their on-premise and cloud-based systems.

According to Centrify, these latest additions to the security and compliance product will help businesses reduce their operating costs across all of their systems and platforms. Achieving security best practices is no easy task, and businesses continue to struggle with keeping the bad guys out while allowing their trusted users in. Although point solutions exist for privilege management for Windows, UNIX and Linux, Centrify claims its updated product is the first to provide privilege management across all platforms.

Specifically for the new Windows privilege management capabilities, here’s what’s new:

“With Centrify, organizations take advantage of their existing Microsoft Active Directory investments across the industry’s broadest set of platforms in heterogeneous environments to centralize disparate identities and control privileged access for improved security and compliance,” said Matt Hur, Centrify’s senior director of Product Management, in a prepared statement.

Additionally, Centrify added enhanced privilege management for both UNIX and Linux, including centralized authorization, user policy enforcement and administrative session audits, and additional platform support.

Considering the concerns businesses have over appropriate access to cloud applications and services, privilege management features that tie in both cloud and on-premises systems should help solve some security and compliance issues for partners’ customers.

This announcement to continue on from an announcement Centrify made late last year. At the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, Centrify unveiled Centrify DirectControl, a product designed to enable organizations to centrally manage and control access to SaaS apps and other cloud services. Historically an on-premise software company, Centrify has made great strides to include support for cloud in its products over the last year or so.