Novell Ships Industry's Most Advanced Compliance Management Solution

Novell today launched a new platform designed to help customers with the critical business challenges of meeting compliance mandates and securing their IT infrastructure. Enterprises today are faced with the complexity of meeting stringent compliance requirements and protecting their businesses from internal and external security threats, even while IT security spending continues to increase unchecked. Balancing the need to support rapidly growing compliance requirements with the reality of shrinking budgets, the Novell® Compliance Management Platform is the industry's most comprehensive solution to help organizations monitor network events and remedy violations as they occur.

"Defending against increasing security threats and meeting compliance requirements in a complex and heterogeneous IT environment are two of the biggest challenges faced by today's enterprises," said Lori Rowland, senior analyst at Burton Group. "Many businesses are struggling to meet compliance mandates or are meeting them only by utilizing inefficient, costly and time consuming techniques that have to be repeated at each audit. Companies require automated solutions and enforced business governance to improve security, streamline daily IT processes, and make the process of an audit more efficient and successful."

Jack McLaine, vice president and IT manager at VIST Financial Corp., formerly Leesport Financial Corp., said, "We are currently using Novell solutions to manage our identity infrastructure, secure company data and generate audit reports. We are pleased that Novell is introducing an integrated, enterprise-ready platform that can reduce the cost and complexity of automating employee and contractor access to business processes, manage user roles and prove to auditors that we are compliant."

To combat security threats and maintain compliance with the myriad of internal and external audit requirements, many organizations have implemented various user provisioning, access control and Web access management systems. Despite the efficiencies in deploying these systems, businesses are realizing they have created silos of policy and security data that often require manual review to prove compliance. The Novell Compliance Management Platform allows organizations to seamlessly integrate provisioning and access management policy with security monitoring to not only tie security to identity information, but also automatically detect, report on and remediate inappropriate and suspicious activities in real-time.

"Compliance management is one of the more complex IT challenges faced by our clients in today's global marketplace," said Mark Ford, principal, Security & Privacy Services, Deloitte & Touche LLP. "An automated platform of solutions that work well together and can simplify the process of meeting internal and external mandates, can help our clients meet their compliance challenges."

Iain Boag, senior vice president, Global Alliances at Atos Origin, said, "As a Novell partner and a global provider of consulting, systems integration and managed operations services, we are pleased that Novell is offering a comprehensive approach to addressing compliance initiatives. Combining our services expertise with Novell's technology innovations, enables our customers to jointly leverage our companies' strengths to reduce the costs, complexity and risk of compliance management."

Reducing the cost and complexity of compliance management

The Compliance Management Platform offers many features designed to decrease deployment costs, lower total cost of ownership and dramatically reduce the time required to utilize provisioning, access management and security solutions. It improves governance and security by enabling common access policies across all identity repositories and provides automated validation of preset business rules. The Compliance Management Platform automatically logs all network activity and delivers compliance reports in an audit-ready format.

Consisting of a prepackaged set of products and integration resources, the Compliance Management Platform delivers all the necessary technology to accurately monitor and demonstrate compliance levels. The products and modules are integrated into a single platform to offer a seamless solution, but also work well as individual products in a mixed-vendor IT environment. The Compliance Management Platform includes:

• Latest versions of Novell's flagship identity and Security solutions – Products included in the platform are Novell Identity Manager 3.6 for user provisioning, roles based access control and password management; Novell SentinelTM 6.1 for real-time security and event monitoring; and Novell Access ManagerTM 3.0 for Web access management.
• Identity-driven security and information event monitoring – The only solution to closely tie identity to security and event monitoring, the Compliance Management Platform offers an identity tracking solution pack for Novell Sentinel that includes an integrated set of Sentinel correlation rules, reports and associated content to add identity visibility and tracking to validate compliance with company policy.
• Indispensable identity management tools – Novell offers an extended set of tools to simplify deployment for customers and partners. Analyzer for Novell Identity Manager 1.0 is a data analysis tool to manage and govern data across disparate sources. Novell Designer for Identity Manager allows customers to more quickly realize the value of the Compliance Management Platform and deploy policies intuitively in a business context without the necessity of coding or scripting. These solutions provide all the tools necessary to complete the analysis, cleansing, reconciliation and reporting of identity related data throughout the enterprise.
• Identity resource kit – Identity Manager Resource Kit 1.2 is a culmination of Novell's years of experience and vast knowledge deploying identity and security solutions to nearly 6,000 customers globally. It is an out-of-the-box set of provisioning policies, documentation, success practices and guides designed to reduce implementation costs and accelerate the deployment of business solutions.

"The Novell Compliance Management Platform is designed for enterprises that have to successfully pass compliance audits, assure the integrity of their IT infrastructure and demonstrate that their business policies are being enforced and implemented," said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager of Identity and Security at Novell. "The platform integrates provisioning, access and security policies and real-time remediation to help organizations automate business processes and validate compliance. This platform can be further enhanced through solutions and services delivered by Novell's broad ecosystem of partners. The Compliance Management Platform is another example of how Novell, through its infrastructure software and partnerships, harmoniously integrates mixed-IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one."

Availability

The Novell Compliance Management Platform is available now. For more information, visit www.novell.com/products/compliancemanagementplatform.