Q&A with David McNeely of Centrify - Page 3

VSM: What unique technologies enable Centrify to support customers moving to a virtualized cloud environment?

DM: Centrify Suite customers can take advantage of free CloudTools that automate the
set-up of security and compliance policies required every time a new virtual Linux system is initialized in a hosted environment. When Centrify CloudTools are enabled for a newly provisioned Linux server at the cloud provider, it will immediately secure the root account, lock down the server and join it to the customer's on-premise Active Directory domain. In this way, only administrators defined by the licensor of the server, and not the cloud service provider, have access to and control over the server.

Just as important, Centrify provides the ability to establish trust between groups of systems that store and process sensitive data regardless of location. These systems can be isolated so they will communicate only with other trusted systems based on policy, and if the organization chooses, they can encrypt all the communication between these trusted systems, further securing data-in-motion between on-premise systems and systems in the cloud. This solution, called DirectSecure, provides a critical level of policy-driven protection across Windows, UNIX and Linux systems. More information about DirectSecure can be found at: http://www.centrify.com/directsecure/server-and-domain-isolation.asp.

VSM: Who is your target market?

DM: With the rise in virtualization, any organization that uses AD and has data residing on virtual servers is a potential customer. We work with customers that range from large world-wide enterprises to government agencies to financial, retail, pharmaceutical, high-tech, and healthcare organizations.  Many of these larger enterprises are employing private cloud infrastructures while at the same time utilizing public clouds for some of their development and testing needs. Again, they need consistency of controls across their entire environment.

VSM: What platforms do you support in a virtual environment? Is support for other systems on the way?

DM: The Centrify Suite supports hypervisors from vendors such as VMware and Citrix. It also supports virtualization technology built into the latest UNIX and Linux operating systems such as Solaris Zones, AIX LPARs and WPARs or HP-UX VPARs.

By the way, we support more than 280 different operating system versions, both physical and virtual. If anyone is interested, a complete list of platform releases can be found at: http://www.centrify.com/products/all-supported-platforms.asp#systems.