Unified identity management provider Centrify announced the release of Centrify Privilege Service, the first cloud-based identity management solution specifically designed to monitor and protect privileged accounts.

The new service is expected to help enterprises protect critical assets from hackers and malicious insiders by expanding the defense perimeter to encompass both internal IT and remote third parties, said Bill Mann, chief product officer at Centrify.

“The requirements for managing privileged users are very different from the mindset and product set that exists in the market … fundamentally what we think is that organizations are moving from a very closed environment to a very open environment,” said Mann, in an interview with The VAR Guy. “There is a hybrid cloud environment that everyone is using at the moment. All of the changes happening within enterprise IT we believe means that the way privileged management is delivered to the market needs to be different as well.”

Centrify said CPS will expand upon and be compatible with the identity management capabilities in the Centrify Server Suite, the company’s on-premise privileged identity management solution. CPS users will have shared account password management for servers, network devices and IaaS between the cloud and on-premise offerings, according to the announcement.

CPS also will protect enterprises with new security and audit requirements for the management of cloud-based and on-premise access to production systems and applications by remote employees and third parties without VPN access.

“Identity and privileged accounts are at the center of today’s ever-growing string of cyberattacks,” said Tom Kemp, CEO and founder of Centrify, in a statement. “Centrify’s modern approach to managing and securing privileged accounts is in stark contrast to legacy privileged identity management software offerings that do not address increasingly hybrid IT environments of on-premises and cloud-based systems.”

New features in Centrify Privilege Service will allow administrators to gain central management access to servers and network devices in emergency scenarios and provides secure cloud-based access to remote workers without VPN access to the full data center, according to the announcement. The service will provide users with secure access to on-premise servers, network devices and IaaS through resource management, shared password management and privileged session monitoring capabilities.

Centrify debuted CPS during RSA Conference 2015 this week in San Francisco, with the solution expected to hit shelves globally in May. Pricing will be set at $50 per privileged user per month.