Novell identity solution streamlines enterprise user provisioning, password management

Novell today announced a new version of the company's award-winning user-provisioning and identity management solution.

Novell Identity Manager 3.5 is the only identity management solution to deliver a high level of integration with authentication, single sign-on and security information and event monitoring solutions.

It also offers powerful, yet flexible tools - such as advanced visual modelling, workflow and self-service capabilities - to help reduce the administrative burden of entering, updating and deleting user information across all systems.

When deployed with the company's award-winning event monitoring solution, Sentinel from Novell, enterprise customers have access to a robust, integrated solution for supporting enterprise security, governance, risk and compliance initiatives.

"Identity management is critical to our organisation as it gives us an effective way to administer user access across our entire enterprise and ensure compliance with an ever-increasing number of regulations," said William Schneider, senior systems administrator of the University of Texas Health Science Centre at Houston, a Novell Identity Manager 3.5 beta customer.

"With the new features of Identity Manager 3.5, we have been able to improve the efficiency and agility of our identity management infrastructure."

Updates featured in Novell Identity Manager 3.5 include:

* Unprecedented levels of integration with Novell event monitoring and access management solutions - Tight integration with Sentinel from Novell gives Identity Manager 3.5 the capability to provide critical feedback of system, network and application event activity within the context of an identity. This combination delivers unique, real-time insight into system activity and a solid framework for enabling remediation processes to alleviate out-of-policy actions. Together, Identity Manager and Sentinel are integral components for supporting compliance with internal policies, industry standards and government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GLBA and FISMA.

Identity Manager 3.5 integrated with Novell Access Manager and Novell SecureLogin offers enhanced credential provisioning. This high level of integration allows Identity Manager 3.5 to automatically provision users with the required credentials for single sign-on, reducing the amount of time organisations spend equipping users with network access and streamlining user access to network resources.

* Advanced tools for streamlined and consistent deployment - Identity Manager 3.5 features substantial improvements designed to make the deployment process faster, easily repeatable and predictable, enabling higher-quality, less-expensive implementation efforts. These include stronger common deployment scenarios, enhanced visual modelling, policy management and reusable configurations. It also tests and validates configurations prior to deployment, to help determine the impact on business processes.
* Tailored to meet business requirements - Greater customisation capabilities give organisations the flexibility they require to adapt the system to meet their organisational needs. Some of these capabilities include comprehensive support for virtual teams, task forces, dotted-line reporting structures and ad-hoc workgroups. This gives IT administrators the ability to model complex and unique business processes such as quorum approval for provisioning requests and digital signing of approvals for non-repudiation.

Future expected enhancements to Identity Manager 3.5 include a functional roles module and additional support and customisation. The roles module will focus on providing customers with the ability to organise and report on provisioning according to business and technical roles. Based on the ANSI/NIST RBAC standard, the roles module is expected to provide multi-level role management, reporting and segregation of duties - a considerable enhancement to user administration and regulatory compliance efforts. Novell will also focus on supporting additional application server platforms and provide the ability for organisations or system integrators to translate user interfaces and customise the way information is displayed in the product.

"With Identity Manager 3.5 we are responding to our customers' need for a flexible identity management solution that helps them ensure a successful and consistent enterprise-wide implementation," said Kent Erickson, vice-president and general manager for Identity and Security Management at Novell. "With the new capabilities of Identity Manager 3.5, organisations can reduce deployment and administration costs, simplify complex provisioning and manage employees' user roles more securely."

Novell Identity Manager 3.5 will be generally available in the next month. For more information about Novell Identity Manager, visit http://www.novell.com/products/identitymanager.