Centrify Unveils Cloud Service for Privileged Identity

APRIL 21st, 2015 — This Morning, identity management provider Centrify unveiled the newest addition to its suite of solutions, Centrify Privilege Service (CPS), a cloud-based identity management solution designed to monitor and protected privileged accounts.

Privileged accounts, according to Centrify’s press release, are accounts which “provide elevated access to an organization’s most critical data, applications, systems and network devices. Traditionally, that would mean employees with access to data centers and infrastructure— DBAs, Unix admins, etc — but Centrify has expanded their definition of a privileged user for CPS.

“Our definition of privileged users also extends to end users within the organization who have access to privileged accounts on applications,” said Bill Mann, Senior Vice President of Products and Chief Product Officer for Centrify, in an interview with Solutions Review.  In a marketing organization, for example, privileged users would have access to high profile social media accounts. “We’re providing a service to help protect and manage the access to these accounts because in the wrong hands they can cause major damage to an organization,” said Mann.

CPS aims at protecting enterprise assets from insider attacks and hackers by leveraging the cloud to extend the enterprise’s defense perimeter to cover internal users, employees working remotely, and third parties.

One of Centrify’s main goals in creating CPS is securing the “modern IT environment,” wherein in-house and remote users need to have managed access  hybrid (cloud and on-premise) infrastructures from a wide range of devices, says Mann. CPS addresses security and audit requirements for the management of both cloud-based and on-premise access, without a VPN, according to Centrify’s statement.

CPS also provides shared account password management for servers, network devices, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms.

Centrify believes CPS will make deployment of security solutions easier. “One of the reasons that this technology has not been deployed as much as it should be in the enterprise is its complexity,” said Mann. “We wanted to solve the deployment problem and make our solution easy for enterprises to adopt and deploy.”

Some specific capabilities highlighted in Centrify’s statement include central management of emergency access to all servers and network devices in “break-glass scenarios,”  and granting cloud-based secure server and network device access to remote and outsourced IT staff.

CPS is built on Centrify’s existing Centrify Identity Service cloud platform, and is  compatible with Centrifty’s on-premise privileged identity management solution, Centrify Server Suite. CPS features “complete data segregation,” says Mann, and customers can choose which data centers in the cloud to put their tenant on. At press time, CPS is available in 15 languages, and across 10 data centers.

CPS will be generally available at the end of April.

For more information on identity and access management solutions, check out Solutions Review’s free 2015 IAM Solutions Buyer’s Guide