Novell's New Compliance Management Solution

Novell Inc. launched the Novell Compliance Management Platform, which integrates identity and security management. It combines a number of Novell products and tools into a comprehensive platform solution.

Focal Points:

• Novell announced and made available its Compliance Management Platform last week. The platform includes 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. The identity tracking solution pack includes an integrated set of Sentinel correlation rules, reports, and associated content to add identity visibility and tracking to validate corporate compliance policy is being adhered to.
• Also included is Novell's Analyzer for Novell Identity Manager 1.0, which is a data analysis tool to manage and govern data across disparate sources. Another component is the Novell Designer for Identity Manager, which enables deployment of policies intuitively in a business context without coding or scripting, company officials claim. These tools allow for analysis, cleansing, reconciliation, and reporting of identity related data throughout the organization.
• The final component in the Compliance Management Platform is the Identity Manager Resource Kit 1.2. The company says it is an out-of-the-box set of provisioning policies, documentation, success practices and guides designed to reduce implementation costs and accelerate deployment. The kit's content is drawn from the vendor's experience and knowledge from deploying identity and security solutions to nearly 6,000 customers globally.

Experton Group believes the enterprise challenge to remain ahead of attacks on corporate systems requires integrated real-time compliance management tools that manage the identity infrastructure, secure corporate data, generate audit reports, and automatically remediate problems. Additionally, the solution needs to support multiple vendor platform bases, as most firms have a mix of middleware from multiple providers. Novell's new platform will now enable it to compete with solutions such as those from CA, Inc., IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. IT executives should ensure their compliance management policies, processes, and management tools are in place and implemented consistently globally. As this is usually not the case in large global enterprises, IT executives at these companies should be aware of exceptions to the rules and gain buy-in to a plan to eliminate the exceptions.