Novell has been talking about cloud and cloud security for more than a year now and, slowly, we are getting a glimpse of where they are going. After realizing that Cloud has taken off in a big way, Novell has been trying to position themselves as a serious cloud player with a stronger emphasis on security. After their announcement on Cloud Security Service last year and demoing a prototype of the service, Novell yesterday announced the general availability (GA) of the service.
- Analyze workloads, gain intelligence and optimize them
- Automate workload portability and integrated testing
- Workload protection through replication and seamless DR
- Cloud orchestration
- Support for multiple hypervisors
- Support for existing enterprise identity service or acting as a single sign-on for cloud providers
- Automatic provisioning and deprovisioning of users
- Extending the enteprise access control policies to the cloud
- Consistent compliance reporting for all cloud applications
- Cloud Security Bridge – This small footprint component (currently, a windows service) resides inside the enterprise firewall and provides protocol proxy, policy agent, audit agent, secure communication manager and a key agent. It operates over standard firewall ports without any need to modify their existing firewall.
- Cloud Security Broker – The brain behind the service which resides on a cloud selected by the enterprise or on one of the Novell certified clouds like Amazon EC2, GoGrid or on eof the vCloud IaaS providers, ensures that the trust is maintained between the enterprise users and cloud providers.
- SaaS/PaaS Connectors – Cloud Security Broker communicates with the cloud provider using these connectors. Right now, connectors are available for Salesforce.com, Google Apps, any service built on top of the Spring Framework, etc.. It is quite easy for any SaaS/PaaS provider to build a connector which will work seamlessly with the Novell Cloud Security Service.