* Novell’s unique perspective on policy management
Identity and context are both key to policy management. In other words, you need to know who or what is doing something – and what the context is – to know whether to allow it.
For example, is it appropriate to allow an authorized individual to access a sensitive spreadsheet from a public Web kiosk or via an unencrypted public wireless access point, just as freely as from their workstation on the enterprise LAN?
Web services have the potential to provide much richer information about the context, for legacy systems as well as for emerging services-based approaches.
In what it rightly describes as “Identity-Driven Computing,” Novell is an example of a company that grasps this promise, bringing two particularly strong product sets to the table to integrate identity with policy and context in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
One is a widely deployed identity management suite. As one of the pioneers of enterprise directory adoption, Novell has earned substantial credibility from what are today its Nsure Identity Manager and eDirectory products. These tools have a history that has played a significant role in enterprise identity management and networking for more than a decade. Today, this product set is complemented by its iChain Web authentication package, Security Manager, BorderManager and File System Factory for policy and security enforcement.
With its acquisition of SilverStream in 2002, Novell added the second most significant pillar to its Identity-Driven Computing strategy. SilverStream gave the company what is today its Extend product set. Extend provides the tools for enabling information systems and resources to be deployed as Web services, as well as a standards-based J2EE application platform for their integration and deployment.
Because Web services are leading the way in the standardization of identity management, service-oriented architectures represent the state of the art in the direct integration of identity with the context and other policy-based attributes of information services. With its product family built around Nsure and Extend, Novell enables enterprises to finely grain definitions of who should have access to what resources, when, where and how. It also provides the essential tools for managing the complete lifecycle not only of user management, but also of Web services and their deployment. Supporting all these capabilities is audit functionality that is itself central to compliance management.
Next week, Novell hosts its annual BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, where the company’s forward-looking take on Identity-Driven Computing is expected to feature prominently, together with Novell’s stake in the future of the open-source enterprise. You can expect to see further manifestations of the linkage of identity not just with people, but also with information resources themselves, as these concepts continue to shape how the enterprise is managed along the lines of identity, policy and context.
