The OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) is an industry-standard, vendor-neutral set of tools and services providing distributed computing capability in a heterogeneous computer environment. DCE provides Security services to protect and control access to data, Naming services to easily find distributed resources, and Tools to develop distributed applications.

DCE runs on all major computing platforms and is designed to support distributed applications in heterogeneous hardware and software environments. DCE is a key technology in three of today's most important areas of computing: security, the World Wide Web, and distributed objects.

The Distributed File Service (DFS) is a distributed DCE application providing an integrated file system with a unified name space, secure access, and file protection.