Leverage existing infrastructure

While many organizations have standardized on Microsoft Active Directory (AD), there have not always been convenient ways to extend the capabilities of the solution to other, non-Microsoft elements of the IT infrastructure. A whole segment of software has emerged recently to bridge some of these systems so that they may take advantage of AD.

According to Mark Diodati, a senior analyst at Burton Group, AD bridging solutions "extend authentication, authorization, and identity management from Microsoft Active Directory to non-Windows platforms like UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS. Using Active Directory, enterprises can manage identities and provide centralized authorization to these platforms. Additionally, these products enable the authentication of non-Windows users against Active Directory, and provide single sign-on between Windows, UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS platforms."

HyTrust Appliance provides out-of-the-box AD bridging for VMware, which enables organizations to leverage the existing AD infrastructure investment. HyTrust Appliance natively integrates with AD--as well as any LDAP v3 server--so that organizations can leverage a pre-existing repository of users, roles, and groups to provide unified access across heterogeneous infrastructure.