Novell Increases Security for the Open Enterprise

Novell today announced significant enhancements to its award-winning identity and access management solutions. Organizations can now rapidly automate provisioning processes and federate user identities to enhance security and ensure compliance. As a result, customers can better protect their IT environments, ensure the privacy of sensitive information and comply with regulatory mandates. These enhancements build on the market momentum and double-digit growth Novell's identity business has achieved over the past few years.

“Enterprise customers are accelerating investments in identity and access management infrastructure to address important business security and regulatory compliance concerns,” said Burton Group CEO Jamie Lewis. “Identity provides the necessary context for individual accountability and enables enforcement of policies to restrict access to private personal and business information. User identity and entitlement provisioning, and federated identity systems are key technologies in a rapidly growing identity and access management market.”

Novell® Identity Manager is deployed by thousands of customers to unify their identity information and policies to secure and manage their enterprise. New features in the latest version, currently in beta testing, include a visual designer for advanced workflow and an enhanced self-service application to help customers reduce the costs of managing their provisioning processes. With these new features, Identity Manager delivers unparalleled ease of use for configuring complex provisioning processes that deliver instant access to company resources.

Robert Henke, manager of the Infrastructure Group Intel at GEHE, a large pharmaceutical wholesaler in Germany, said, “We have a lot of different platforms to support because we like the best of breed approach. Novell was the perfect fit because they were the only identity management solution that could easily connect with all our systems. Not only do we now have better control over the access rights users have to different systems, but our users are able to have immediate access to the resources they need when they come into the company or change departments.”

Novell Access Manager® implements the Liberty Alliance and SAML specifications, enabling business partnersto securely share user credentials for a seamless user experience across their applications. Rather than simply sharing identity information between partners, Access Manager also provisions a new account when one does not already exist across partner Web sites. Currently in beta testing, this unique solution leverages open standards to simplify the user experience for business partners.

“Novell identity management solutions have helped us bring together different companies with different databases and with different user management to provide our users with one user ID and one password to access our systems,” said Dr. Wolfgang Seiler, chief technology officer at Allianz Suisse. “With our identity management foundation in place we are much more flexible and able to react to business demands, and we look forward to extending the value of our solution with advanced provisioning and federation capabilities.”

“Novell's successful launch of the beta programs, continued growth, and success with customers around the world demonstrate the value our products provide to the market,” said David Litwack, Novell senior vice president and general manager for Identity-Driven Products. “Novell is delivering technology that helps customers meet today's security and compliance demands with the flexibility to adapt to new challenges as they arise.”

For more information about Novell Security, go to http://www.novell.com/identity.