Novell Expands Nsure Solutions for Managing Compliance with Government Regulations and Organizational Policies

For organizations trying to reduce their liability and risk by ensuring compliance with government regulations and internal policies, Novell is releasing a major new addition to its Novell® Nsure™ secure identity management solutions. The company today announced the availability of Novell Audit, secure logging and auditing software that allows businesses to track and monitor security-related activity in internal systems and applications.

"Government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley are requiring organizations to demonstrate better control and accountability of information access for employees, partners and customers," said Dave Lawrence, vice president of Novell Nsure solutions. "Novell Nsure solutions allow organizations to make certain that only authorized users have access to sensitive corporate data, based on their role and responsibilities within the company. Then, as part of those solutions, Novell Audit makes it possible to extract a record of the transactions within their systems - helping companies identify when business policies are being violated or when users gain excessive levels of access that put them in a position to violate policies."

Novell Audit collects security, system and application event data to a centralized log, then filters the collected information to provide real-time monitoring, trigger notifications and generate reports. Gathering this data about system access and usage patterns allows companies to make informed decisions that drive the success and ensure the security of the business. It also allows organizations to quickly and easily identify suspicious activity and creates a non-repudiative audit trail that can be used to forensically reconstruct the sequence of events after an illegal or unauthorized event occurs; and it does so in a way that the collected data will be admissible in legal proceedings.

The intersection of auditing technology and identity management is now more apparent than ever. According to Burton Group analyst Gerry Gebel, "Consolidated auditing and reporting across all infrastructure components, including network, application and identity management, is becoming increasingly important for enterprises. The ability to monitor, track and evaluate how access rights are being used is a necessity to meet government regulations and mandates for proper corporate oversight."

Alongside Novell's new auditing software, the company is also delivering a software development kit (SDK) that can be used to quickly instrument third-party applications to work with Novell Audit and to create custom tools for monitoring and responding to activity in the audited systems. Novell Platinum PartnerSM Novacoast has already used the SDK to integrate the auditing technology with third-party applications, including an intrusion detection system and a help desk application.

"Novell Audit offers a very rich feature set that's relatively simple to tap into using the development tools Novell provides," said Novacoast CTO Adam Gray. "As part of a broader solution, Novell Audit opens a significant opportunity to help our enterprise customers manage issues around regulatory compliance and policy enforcement."

Novell Audit is available July 9 to customers worldwide through Novell solution provider partners, Novell consultant and system integrator partners, or directly from Novell by calling 888-321-4272. Pricing is $1,495 per audited system plus $9,995 for the secure logging server. The Novell Audit SDK is available for free download by going to http://developer.novell.com/ndk/naudit.htm.