Identity management powerhouse Centrify Corp. is launching a new service at the RSA Conference this morning aimed at extending the control that organizations have over user access within their networks outside the firewall. It promises to help address the new realities of information governance in the cloud era.

The growing amounts of data that workers are moving off-premise fall beyond the reach of traditional policy enforcement processes originally built with internal systems in mind, an issue that receives no shortage of attention nowadays and has given rise to an entire crop of startups offering to help. But the lack of reach is only the start of the challenge.

The shift toward cloud-based operations is also making data once kept on internal systems much more accessible to the outside. As an example, a manifest that would have been simply emailed to a supplier is now just as likely as not to be distributed via a shared folder on a service like Huddle where the IT department often isn’t fully in control.

That creates a potential opening for hackers to infiltrate the network, which adds up to a considerable amount of risk across all the different channels that a typical enterprise uses to exchange data with remote contractors, partners and other members of its extended business ecosystem. The new Centrify Privilege Service offers to tighten the loop on the process.

As the name implies, the cloud-based platform provides a centralized environment for managing who accesses what data across an organization’s entire infrastructure, including both on-premise and cloud-based systems. Administrators can limit the reach of shared accounts to only the necessary resources through the console and monitor individual sessions.

That activity is also logged to an audit trail that Centrify says allow organizations to track historical access patterns and meet regulatory requirements for accountability. The functionality is an extension of the company’s flagship Identity Platform, which it’s been investing heavily to expand into new areas over the last few months.

Centrify has previously brought its privileged identity management capabilities to Hadoop and most recently ventured into the connected universe with the introduction of single sign-on functionality for wearable devices. The hybrid cloud is merely the latest stop in what is shaping up as a highly aggressive expansion path for the authorization provider.