Centrify's Enterprise Identity Management Makes Work Easier, More Secure

Security is usually a pediment to work, but Centrify’s solution makes work easier.

This commentary comes from Bill Mann, the company’s senior vice president of products and chief product officer, with whom I met yesterday at TMC (News - Alert) Editor’s Day in Silicon Valley.

Mann was referring to some of Centrify’s recent moves, including its integrations with Dropbox (News - Alert) and Google for Work. These integrations mean that individuals using Centrify, and who already authenticated on its portal when they sat down at their computers at the beginning of their work session, don’t need to sign on again with Dropbox or Google (News - Alert) for Work. That’s good for knowledge workers because it creates for them an experience with less friction, Mann said, and it’s good for the enterprise because it provides security via multifactor authentication and a higher level of control.

Centrify will create an a Dropbox account for all employees that use its service, and it will also make sure that account is disabled once employees are no longer employees with the Centrify business customer.

As for Centrify’s relationship with Google for Work, that involves it offering identity support – again, including a single sign on and multifactor authentication – for Google Apps and Google Compute (in this case it’s the business customer’s IT administrators who are being authenticated – and without needing to know a password). Meanwhile, Centrify is providing context-based access for Android (News - Alert) environments. That way if a knowledge worker is trying to connect from a hotel and his or her phone has been compromised, for example, Centrify can see that and block access.

Centrify also earlier this month announced integration partnerships with cloud access security brokers CloudLock, Elastica (News - Alert), Imperva, Netskope, and Skyhigh Networks. Mann explained that while Centrify offers control and visibility into what’s happening around attaining access to an application, these new partners address what happens once the user is inside the application.

“So it’s the yin and yang,” he added.

The integration between Centrify’s solution and the solutions of these cloud access security brokers was the first step of these relationships, he said. Now Centrify and these new partners are also jointly going to market with their solutions.