Stories about: Novell

The role management software vendor community is relatively young, and as such, Burton Group says there is no clear market leader. Vendors can be categorized into two segments: general purpose solutions and embedded solutions.

As enterprises seek out ways to reduce IT costs, optimize resources and improve operational efficiencies, three technology trends have started to dominate: virtualization, service-oriented architecture and mobility. More promising yet is the intertwining of these unique technologies.

SIM (security information management) products have become more accepted as critical components within the network security infrastructure. As such, understanding the criteria for selecting SIMs has become more important. Moreover, in a fast-evolving market segment [SIM becomes SEM (security event manager), becomes SI/EM, becomes ...], it's more important to understand the important architectural differences and implementation requirements than the industry acronyms and product names. A wave of consolidation has already begun to hit the SIM market, but the major issues and deployment criteria span brands and individual technologies.

IBM upgraded its identity management capabilities with tools to help customers manage user access to sensitive information, the company said Wednesday.

Centeris, which provides cross-platform authentication via Microsoft's Active Directory, Tuesday enhanced its Likewise platform (Clear Choice Test of Likewise)Â and an added open source project that will be distributed with the top Linux operating systems.

Federated identity has long been a goal of many IT organizations. One look at the promise of federation, and it is easy to see why. After all, empowering one organization to serve as an identity provider for another frees IT from having to manage the identities of partnering organizations' employees and customers, thereby facilitating the pursuit of competitive-advantage projects. In this era of increasing enterprise decentralization, thanks in large part to the Web, establishing a federated identity framework is fast proving as essential as it is hard to pull off.

Faced with looming regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Craig Shumard, chief information security officer for healthcare provider Cigna, knew he needed better tools for role-based access control.

Microsoft is offering updates on the progress of interoperability initiatives, including the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC) and the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA).

A unique demonstration showed user-centric identity software from major vendors, start-ups, one-woman projects and open source hackers all working in concert to replace passwords with validated identity-card access to Web-based resources.

Windows users were at risk for in-the-wild vulnerabilities fewer days on average last year than users of rival operating systems from Apple, Novell, Red Hat and Sun, a Microsoft executive claimed.