Cooley Law School Secures Identities for Cloud-based Google Apps with Novell Identity Manager

Novell today announced that Thomas M. Cooley Law School, the largest American Bar Association accredited law school in the United States, has deployed Novell® Identity Manager to provide a consistent framework for managing more than 5,500 student identities across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The law school is also poised to take advantage of emerging cloud applications to keep pace with student needs.

According to a recent total cost of ownership analysis from Rencana, many customers have indicated their intention to manage tens or hundreds of applications through integration with an identity and access management environment. Using a cost-per-application integration approach, the difference in TCO represents hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings. By choosing Novell, Cooley Law School is both strengthening security and reducing costs for the school.

Part of the Novell WorkloadIQ™ product suite, Novell Identity Manager helps organizations to manage identities inside and outside of their enterprise, with real-time provisioning, reporting and roles management. The solution unifies digital identities across all business systems in the enterprise, helping the enterprise stay in compliance with security policies and regulatory guidelines. Using Novell Identity Manager, the school has gained an intelligent framework for managing identities, no matter where applications reside, benefiting the school and students alike.

Gracon Services Incorporated, a Novell Platinum PartnerNet™ member, played an integral role in the project, from vendor selection to design, deployment and rollout. "Thomas Cooley Law School now has an extensible framework they can build upon as they leverage additional cloud-based applications," said Michael K. Grady, chairman of Gracon Services, Inc. "Moving forward, it will be easy to plug in new applications, so the school can quickly offer more services, without having to increase staff."

Cooley Law School now uses Novell Identity Manager to integrate GoogleApps* with eDirectory™, which authenticates users to various academic systems via its web-based student portal. When a user account is created, changed or deactivated, this information is reflected through all connected systems, without the need for manual intervention. Using CosmoKey’s Novell IDM Connector for GoogleApps, the school was able to provision students to GoogleApps in record time.

"We set out to improve the way we performed authentication to gain efficiencies and adapt to the emerging needs of our student population," said Greg Colegrove, director of IT Operations for the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. "Securing cloud-based applications, such as GoogleApps, was part of that vision. Novell Identity Manager has given us an intelligent and secure approach for adopting new cloud applications, without adding administrative challenges. We’re now well-positioned to strengthen security and achieve significant productivity gains while meeting the evolving needs of our students."

"Efficient identity management is key to increasing security and streamlining business operations," said Jay Roxe, director of Identity and Security solution marketing for Novell. "We’re pleased to see that the Thomas M. Cooley Law School had the vision to leverage Novell Identity Manager to bring the same levels of security and accountability to its cloud-based environment as it has for its physical on-premise environment."

For more information on Novell’s identity and security solutions, visit http://www.novell.com/solutions/identity-and-security. To read more about how Novell Identity Manager is helping Thomas M. Cooley Law School strengthen security across physical and cloud applications, visit http://www.novell.com/success/thomas_cooley.html.