Over at The VAR Guy, we’ve covered Centrify’s ongoing developments in the Active Directory scene, but now the company is taking everything it knows about Active Directory and putting it in the cloud. Its CloudTools offering is designed to provide Active Directory security solutions for Linux cloud-based systems.

Basically, Centrify CloudTools wants to be the go-to tool for hosted Active Directory platforms. It’s actually that simple. CloudTools acts as a add-on for users who already are using Centrify, and applies the familiar Active Directory authentication software suite to clouds, including Amazon EC2 and more. Now, any access to the cloud is monitored and authenticated via Active Directory and tagged to a specific user, bringing all the joy of on-premise user monitoring and management to a cloud environment.

The best part is, Centrify CloudTools is free for existing users, and the company has even built it into its free Centrify Express 2011 offering. The ongoing strategy for Centrify has been to develop a way for IT admins and VARs to establish an “enterprise-out” style to managing fleets of computers. Centrify believes with Active Directory as the security glue holding everything together, compliance and security issues will be minimal or easy to mitigate. With the introduction of CloudTools, the bottom line for VARs and resellers working in the cloud space is one word: value. When existing companies take their solutions and adapt them to the cloud, they can help proliferate product deeper into the channel, provide more resources for their partner communities and, of course, get to jump on the cloud wave.

Worthy of note: Centrify followed through with its plans to launch cloud support, originally disclosed to The VAR Guy in March 2011. Bravo.

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