AS TRADITIONAL PERIMETERS ARE REDEFINED, PRIVILEGED ACCESS SECURITY IS KEY TO SECURING THE HYBRID ENTERPRISE

Commissioned by Centrify Corporation, new Forrester study reveals inherent value of cloud-based Privileged Identity Management

Centrify, the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats, today released findings from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Centrify, indicating that Privileged Identity Management (PIM)-as-a-Service is the ideal approach to securing hybrid IT infrastructures. More specifically, a PIM solution must secure access, manage privilege and audit activity across an organisation’s entire security ecosystem, including secure outsourcing of IT and application development.

“A PIM-as-a-Service solution is incredibly effective in securing access to the IT infrastructure of today’s modern enterprise that has systems and application deployed in a hybrid mix of on-premises and in the cloud, and have users that are increasingly working remotely,” said Bill Mann, chief product officer of Centrify. “We believe this Forrester study shows that organisations running critical applications and servers in the cloud are just as secure as those running them on-premises. Ultimately, security correlates to solutions that can effectively reduce identity-related risk in today’s enterprise as they stretch across multiple datacentres, devices and users.”

Forrester surveyed 150 IT decision makers with the title of IT director or higher in companies with more than 500 total employees about privileged access security. Top-line findings are as follows:

• All organisations outsource at least some of their IT, application development, and infrastructure functions
• Nearly all organisations permit privileged remote access
• Decision makers choose PIM-as-a-Service for its ability to reap the benefits of the cloud while still providing quality security
• A majority of decision makers prefer to manage privileged access security through a single platform

The Forrester study states, “Organisations need a privileged access security solution that effectively manages access while still allowing employees and business partners to do their work and contribute to the business. Furthermore, decision-makers have found positive results utilising PIM-as-a-Service solutions to solve this challenge.”

Centrify delivers a PIM-as-a-Service product called Centrify Privilege Service that addresses today’s hybrid IT environments of on-premises systems and apps, as well as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  Privilege Service  combines shared account password management — including support for vaulting and auto-rotation of enterprise passwords —with the ability to securely manage and audit access by internal users, outsourced IT and third party vendors.  Centrify’s Privileged Access Security solution includes Privilege Service and Centrify Server Suite to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive PIM offerings for securing access to IT infrastructure.

For more information about this survey, please download the Thought Leadership Paper summarizing the findings at: http://www.centrify.com/forrester-study