Technology & Tools

Centrify Adds Privilege Access Controls for Outsourced Environments

Plus: SteelHead Mobile Gets Windows 10 Support; 5nine beefs up security suite; Metalogix adds backup support for Exchange Online in its management tool.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 01/29/2016

Centrify this month added a new way for organizations that outsource IT to ensure those outside providers have refined privilege access that can restrict their ability to connect to systems outside of their purview. The company has implemented federated privilege access enterprise wide to its Privilege Identity Management offering, so when using an outsourcer or third party, IT doesn't have to give users VPN access or carte blanche to systems throughout the enterprise if they're only supposed to access specific resources.

The new capability lets administrators give outsourced developers or systems managers temporary and restricted access to datacenter and cloud-based infrastructure. The federated privilege access capability allows outside third parties and outsourcing providers to use their own internal credentials. If a developer or administrator with the outsourcing provider leaves or has credentials revoked, they are blocked from accessing the customers' resources as well.

Centrify said the new PIM release also has improved authentication including support for multifactor access -- a capability that will make it harder for malware attacks to come from breached credentials, according to the company. It's based on SAML authentication.

Riverbed Adds Windows 10 Support to SteelHead Mobile
Riverbed last week added support for Windows 10 and several other recently updated client operating systems for its SteelHead Mobile software. Based on its flagship SteelHead enterprise WAN optimization technology, the mobile edition is a software-only client interface that provides application acceleration for applications such as e-mail access, file transport, line of business CRM and ERP software and Web apps.

Steelhead Mobile also can accelerate client-based encryption, which can typically cause a drag on performance. Specifically, it can bolster SSL or HTTPS based applications and it also supports RADIUS/TACACS authentication, secure role-based management, support for CAC (Common Access Card) and FIPS compliance (for federal agencies).

Riverbed claims that up to 20,000 users can connect to each centralized controller (or as many as 80,000 when accessing a cluster). The new Windows 10 support, which Riverbed said includes tablets, is available in the SteelHead Mobile 4.8.0 release, announced earlier in January. In addition to Windows 10, the update now supports Apple Macintosh users running OSX 10.9 and OSX 10.10 with support coming to OSX 10.11 shortly.

5nine Steps Up Intrusion Detection in Security Suite
5nine Software has upgraded its cloud security suite adding improved intrusion detection, automation and logging. Similar to previous versions, 5nine Cloud Security v7 is designed to optimize Microsoft Hyper-V-based virtual machines.

Chicago-based 59 is emphasizing the improved IDS features, which now includes integration with Snort for Business, the open source intrusion protection platform designed to provide real-time traffic analysis and packet logging that performs protocol analysis, content searching and matching used to detect attacks and probes. The new release allows for the movement of a VM directly into a security group as it's created to ensure firewall, intrusion detection and network traffic scanning settings are consistent. The company also added antivirus, intrusion detection scanning and updated management to give administrators more control over performance. Pricing for the software, licensed on a dual-CPU basis, starts at $199.

Metalogix Adds Exchange Support to Essentials for Office 365 Tool
A new version of Essentials for Office 365 from Metalogix Inc. now offers backup and data protection capability for Microsoft Exchange Online, adding to the management tool's ability to create, manage and restore backups from SharePoint site collections, lists, libraries and content mailboxes, as well as from individual OneDrive accounts.

Metalogix claims the release offers improved restore capabilities for business continuity. The new Essentials release also offers granular migration, security and permissions management and supports the SharePoint Server 2016 Technical Preview.