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Centrify Wins TMC Cloud Computing Excellence Award

Written by Doug | Feb 29, 2012 5:00:00 AM

Centrify Wins TMC Cloud Computing Excellence Award for Active Directory-Based Security and Compliance of Cloud-Hosted Servers

Centrify CloudTools Earns TMC's Cloud Computing Magazine's Excellence Award for Uniquely Applying Active Directory-Based Controls Across Cloud Platforms Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of security and compliance solutions that centrally control, secure and audit access to cross-platform systems and applications using Active Directory, today announced that TMC, a global integrated media company, has named Centrify CloudTools as a 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner, presented by Cloud Computing Magazine. Centrify CloudTools earned this industry award for its proven ability to allow organizations to dynamically apply Active Directory-based authentication and access control to a broad set of Linux systems running within cloud hosting providers, such as Amazon EC2 and the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. "Recognizing leaders in the advancement of cloud computing, TMC is proud to announce Centrify as a recipient of the first Cloud Computing Excellence Award," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. "CloudTools has demonstrated innovation as well as the ability to improve the security of cloud environments." The Cloud Computing Excellence Awards recognize the companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. Winners of the Cloud Computing Excellence Award were published in the January 2012 issue of Cloud Computing Magazine . Managing dynamic cloud-based systems requires automated security infrastructure to allow critical security and compliance policies to be applied consistently as every new system is initialized within a hosted environment. For newly provisioned Linux servers in the cloud, CloudTools immediately secures the root accounts, locks down the servers, and joins them to the customer's on-premises Active Directory domain. With CloudTools, only administrators defined by the licensor of the server, and not the cloud service provider, have access to and control over the server. All access to the server is provided through Active Directory credentials, enabling server activity to be associated with a specific user. Similarly, when a server is terminated from a hosted service, it can automatically be removed from Active Directory. "TMC delivers important information to IT staff across industries, and we are extremely proud to be recognized with this cloud excellence award," said Frank Cabri, Centrify VP of Marketing. "Whether systems are deployed on-premise or in the cloud, Centrify helps customers ensure that policies governing authentication, access privileges and auditing are centrally managed and enforced consistently to meet security and compliance mandates." Centrify CloudTools are available for free to customers of Centrify Suite 2012 (Centrify's family of licensed software solutions) and are also a new component of Centrify Express 2012 (Centrify's free suite of Active Directory-based integration solutions for UNIX, Linux and Apple Mac OS X systems that offers authentication, single sign-on, remote access, file-sharing, and reporting for cross-platform systems). Used in conjunction with the Centrify Suite or Centrify Express, Centrify CloudTools enable an "enterprise-out" approach that establishes Active Directory as the center of trust between enterprise and cloud servers, whether private or hosted, to make them as secure and compliant as those in an on-premises data center.