Centrify Corporation has announced extensive support for heterogeneous, virtualized data centers with the general availability of the Centrify Suite update 3. With this release, Centrify facilitates an organization's ability to securely and efficiently transition from a traditional, physical infrastructure to a dynamic, virtualized computing environment. Centrify enables organizations to leverage their existing Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure for centralized identity management, access control, privilege management and auditing across the industry's broadest range of platforms - with newly released support for over a dozen hypervisor platforms and over 190 UNIX and Linux operating systems running as guests on hypervisors or on physical servers.

As noted by analysts, server virtualization platforms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, but also increasingly heterogeneous as organizations deploy bare-metal hypervisors from vendors such as VMware and Citrix while, in parallel, they leverage virtualization technology built into the latest UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems. This growing ubiquity and the ability for business-critical guest systems to proliferate and seamlessly move and migrate across a datacenter can lead to a loss of control from a security and management perspective. But the need to secure these guest systems' underlying hypervisors from insider and outsider threats cannot be ignored.

In addition, as organizations continue the migration from a physical to a virtualized server infrastructure, they find themselves managing a complex environment of heterogeneous operating systems and applications. IT managers need unified, global control over their evolving data center to meet security and compliance requirements - from management and segregation of duties to protection and auditing across any server instance.

"Virtualization software creates a new IT platform that needs to be secured. Security policy enforcement solutions are needed in virtualized computing environments to supplement what is available in physical computing environments and to address blind spots within the virtual server that external physical security solutions can't see," said Neil MacDonald, vice president of research at Gartner(1). "Favor vendors that offer a physical and virtual security solution and that provide a single management console and consistent policy framework across both environments."

The Centrify Suite with DirectControl 4.3 addresses the need to secure both physical and virtual environments by effectively turning a non-Microsoft system or hypervisor into an Active Directory client, enabling administrators to secure that system using the same authentication and Group Policy services currently deployed for their Windows systems, as well as adding granular access control through its patent-pending Zone technology.

The Centrify Suite has long supported VMware ESX and other virtual environments, and with this release has added support for eleven new virtualization platforms such as Sun Solaris xVM, IBM AIX WPAR and IBM z/Linux, and has added support for over 40 new guest operating system such as Fedora 10, Mandriva 2009, Ubuntu 8.10 and OpenSUSE 10 bringing the total to over 190 operating systems supported -- both of which lead the industry in Active Directory cross-platform integration and interoperability.