Novell Scales Identity Management Heights

According to Nick Nikols, Novell vice president of product management, Identity Manager 4 is the only identity management offering capable of supporting such scale because the underlying policy engine doesn’t rely on any hardcoded scripts to attach identity to a service or a specific end user. Instead, Identity Manager 4 makes use of a modular architecture where all the various policy engines are informed of the underlying relationships between all the components.

As identity management represents a major hurdle standing in the way of the evolution of a federated cloud computing model, Novell is hoping to stake out a claim to identity management services in the cloud that need to scale across multiple data centers and cloud computing platforms.

This approach, he added, will also substantially reduce consultant costs, which typically have been exorbitant given the complex nature of large-scale identity management projects, said Nikols.

Identity Manager 4, currently in beta and expected to ship in July, will be available in a basic edition that supports most commercial on-premise and software-as-a-service applications, and in an advanced edition that includes more workflow and management capabilities.