CIO East Africa - Business Technology Leadership

The cloud lifts Tuesday on Novell's Cloud Security Service, which is software designed so that hosting and cloud-service providers can offer authentication, authorization, provisioning and de-provisioning services to their enterprise customers.

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The Novell Cloud Security Service software is intended to be used inside a provider's data infrastructure to enable the equivalent of a single-sign-on function to multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) options that enterprise customers want to use so they can easily provision and de-provision employees. To make the Novell Cloud Security Service work, the enterprise would need to install a server software component, said to be less than 100MB, on their own premises, to communicate back to the hosting provider.

That on-premises component becomes the central point for enabling control over password-based authentication, and the provisioning of SaaS services and the immediate de-provisioning of them when it's determined an employee's use of SaaS should be terminated. Novell has been at work on the cloud-security project, which makes use of open protocols such as SAML, for over a year.

According to Dipto Chakravarty, Novell's general manager for cloud security, there are already some deployments of Novell Cloud Security Service, including by the Finnish telecom provider Elisa Corp. and Crescent Enterprise Solutions in the United States. Competing identity management approaches are also available from Simplified and Ping.