Novell Releases NCSS Cloud Security Service - Expands Identity Product Portfolio in WorkloadIQ

August 25, 2010

Part of Novell's WorkloadIQ vision, Novell Cloud Security Service gives cloud providers the ability to deliver secure access and compliance in the cloud for their customers. Novell Cloud Security Service is a critical part of Novell's broader identity and security portfolio, which enables enterprises to have a consistent framework for managing identities across physical, virtual and cloud deployments. Novell is the only vendor to offer this integrated capability, which helps organizations manage complex security and compliance requirements through a cost-effective and easy-to-use suite of products.

With Novell Cloud Security Service, enterprises can quickly and easily extend their identity infrastructure to any public cloud. Any changes that are made to their users or permissions are immediately replicated in the cloud environment, thus ensuring one consistent identity and security framework for the enterprise, regardless of where the computing is actually taking place.

"Security is the biggest hindrance to cloud adoption that service providers offering cloud services need to overcome," said Antonio Piraino, Vice President of Research, Tier 1 Research. "The ability to provide interoperable security solutions for and between an enterprise's internal infrastructure and the cloud provider's platform will alleviate the biggest assurance, vulnerability and SLA concerns enterprises have today."

As cloud computing vendors that offer software-, platform-, or infrastructure-as-a-service seek to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, value-added services like customized security become increasingly important. Novell Cloud Security Service helps cloud service providers deliver trusted security assurance and compliance to their enterprise customers. It is the first, and only multi-tenant identity and access management solution that provides just-in-time provisioning, authentication, authorization and support for compliance.

The Novell Cloud Security Service currently has several beta deployments globally. With today's announcement of general availability, Novell's cloud services team will target more than 200 IaaS, and 1,300 SaaS and PaaS vendors to get them started with this ground-breaking technology that is supported by more than 60 patents.

"Novell's ability to deliver a complete set of provisioning, access, security and compliance solutions that help both organizations and cloud providers control access, monitor activity and provide compliance is yet another example of their leadership in this area," said Jim Reavis, co-founder and executive director of the Cloud Security Alliance. "The Cloud Security Alliance is working closely with Novell to address many of the trust concerns end-user organizations have with cloud computing, including issues that go beyond just technology solutions."

Novell Cloud Security Service is hosted in the cloud, either where the provider hosts its application or via a Novell hosting partner. A user can log on directly or via the enterprise identity system. The service first verifies the identity and, if successful, will generate an identity token in the format needed by the SaaS provider. The user is now authenticated to the SaaS service. Once inside the application, the application connectors that are provided with the service capture deep page-level user activity and provide the audit stream for compliance purposes.

WorkloadIQ is Novell's vision to deliver products for the rapidly growing intelligent workload management market, which IDC estimates is more than $4.2B. A key part of this vision is to deliver a spectrum of cloud-ready Identity and Security solutions to meet today's enterprise need for security in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

As cloud models mature and businesses look at cloud solutions, security questions such as protecting data in the cloud, providing audit reports for inspection and ensuring regulatory compliance are becoming increasingly important. For enterprises looking at moving critical workloads to the cloud, the combination of Novell Identity Manager 4 and Novell Access Manager is the only solution that offers seamless provisioning and access in real-time.

"Despite the speed with which organizations are deploying virtualized systems and moving to SaaS, reporting on access to cloud-based resources is a continuing challenge. Novell Identity Manager provides an intelligent, identity-driven framework to ensure consistent management of identities, both in our organization and in the cloud," said Mark Edson, infrastructure manager, Huntington National Bank. "With Novell Access Manager, we've built a flexible solution to establish a secure, federated connection with our cloud providers so our passwords are never shared with an external party."

For cloud service providers who want to deliver a secure, compliant computing environment for their customers, the Novell Cloud Security Service offers a multi-tenant environment with built-in metering, billing and auditing.

"There is a tremendous market opportunity to help our customers with their cloud strategy, including deploying and managing cloud applications in a secure and compliant manner," said Kevin Nikkhoo, founder and president of CloudsID.com. "Novell Cloud Security Service offers secure access management from the cloud and works with our customers' existing identity infrastructure to enable us to offer our customers best-in-class solutions."

Many Novell customers today are seeking to move applications to the cloud in order to reduce costs and increase agility.

"Today's enterprises are embracing cloud services while continuing their investment in their physical and virtual data centers. To support these efforts, Novell offers the most complete and interoperable set of provisioning, access, security and compliance products for IT organizations and cloud providers. Novell Cloud Security Service complements Novell's comprehensive suite of Identity and Security solutions," said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager, Security, Management and Operating Platforms, Novell. "Our goal is to give our customers the ability to take advantage of the economic benefits of cloud computing while also mitigating risk and maintaining compliance."