Identity in the cloud

Novell has made its Cloud Security Service generally available. The company announced the service, which gives cloud providers the opportunity to secure their offerings for their customers, last year and it has been used in several beta programmes since then.

The Novell service has been designed to help enterprises maintain their identity infrastructure within cloud environments by ensuring that any changes made to users or permissions are replicated within the public cloud. This means that enterprises can be assured of a consistent framework for managing identities, regardless of where the computing is taking place, said Novell.

Novell Cloud Security Service is hosted in the cloud and users can either log on direct or via the enterprise identity system. The service first verifies the identity and will generate an identity token in the format needed by the SaaS provider. Users are now authenticated to the SaaS service.

Novell is aiming to interest more than 200 IaaS, and 1,300 SaaS and PaaS vendors in the technology. “Security is the biggest hindrance to cloud adoption that service providers offering cloud services need to overcome,” said Antonio Piraino, VP of research, Tier 1 Research. “The ability to provide interoperable security solutions for and between an enterprise’s internal infrastructure and the cloud provider’s platform will alleviate the biggest assurance, vulnerability and SLA concerns enterprises have today.”