Novell Secures the Cloud With New Access Control Service

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As enterprises move their workloads to the cloud, the need for integrated security is key. In an effort to help organizations better protect those workloads, Novell is launching its Cloud Security Service — a new offering focusing on providing businesses with access and compliance controls for the cloud.

The Novell Cloud Security Service is not about securing the cloud from a network or application layer. Instead, the service is focused on a different problem set for cloud security.

“Cloud security means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” Anita Moorthy, cloud security solution manager at Novell, told InternetNews.com. “Novell cloud security focuses on the identity and access management problem in the cloud. It’s about answering the question of who has access to what and how can companies have assurance that the right people are accessing the right data at the right time.”

The idea is to ensure that enterprise policy and security can be extended to the cloud, Moorthy said. She explained that Novell’s cloud security service provides detailed audit logs from cloud applications back to the enterprise, and that it can integrate with enterprise identity systems.

As a result, the cloud security service, which Novell sees as an OEM solution, is intended to be complementary with traditional identity management offerings like Novell’s own recent Identity Manager 4 release, which handles provisioning, user administration and setup of attributes and profiles, she said.

“Cloud Security Service works on the provider side to consume the information that an identity management solution from Novell or another ID vendor might provide,” Moorthy said. “This is more from the cloud to the enterprise, versus the Identity Manager, which is more from the enterprise to the cloud.”

The Cloud Security Service is currently being offered as a software appliance, and is hosted in the cloud either by the enterprise or a Novell hosting partner. Novell said it built the service using its own SUSE Studio Linux appliance technology, which enables developers to create a software appliance that includes both the application as well as a SUSE Linux operating system

Baber Amin, senior product manager at Novell, told InternetNews.com that the Cloud Security Service will run in multiple virtualization environments including both VMware and Xen.

The security solution also represents only one part of the total cloud solution set that Novell aims to offer. For instance, the company said it is also currently building out a cloud manager solution that will be able integrate with its security service.

“Novell Cloud Manager is the management frontend and can manage a hybrid public/private cloud and how to move the different pieces back and forth,” Amin said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.