The challenges of migrating NIS deployment

Overview

Sun Microsystems’s Network Information Service (NIS, originally known as Sun Yellow Pages) has been the primary choice for managing Unix identity information in a networked environment for many years. Unfortunately, NIS has several shortcomings in the areas of security, manageability, and network dependency, and its successor, NIS+, was never widely accepted as a standard.

Increasingly, NIS has proven unable to pass stringent security guidelines for user account management and access control, both from a simple IT best practices perspective and from a regulatory compliance perspective. This fact, combined with Sun's end-of-life announcement for NIS and NIS+, has prompted corporate security and compliance managers and IT administrators to look for a solution to replace NIS with a solution that is secure, manageable, and cost-effective.

This white paper examines the challenges of migrating NIS deployments to a central repository, and explains in detail how a combination of Microsoft Active Directory and Centrify DirectControl can deliver a cost-effective solution that strengthens security while improving IT efficiency.