Novell starts down the road of Sentinel integration
Novell
today announced the first update to the Sentinel the security and event monitoring and reporting solution it obtained with
the $72M acquisition of e-Security in April. The company did what it had to by adding support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and bolstered support for non-US markets, where SUSE is strongest, with with addition of German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese languages. Hardly sufficient, you would say, to justify the "
major milestone" headline on the press release. And you would be right. What turns this announcement into something more significant is the fact that Sentinel is now able to collect events from Novell's suite of identity management offerings.
Whilst hardly earth shattering, this is important since it enables identity data to be correlated with other runtime events including, importantly, application logs. Too much of the discussion relating to the role of identity management in compliance focusses on ensuring that identity data and associated entitlements are managed and provisioned in accordance with policy within identity management solutions and far less on then determining whether those policies are subsequently enforced by the systems which use that data. This announcement goes some way to address that.
This announcement is important for Novell in two regards. Firstly, Sentinel includes more sophisticated event correlation and reporting capabilities than Novell Audit, the company's pre- e-Security compliance audit and reporting offering, which was largely a simple data dump for event data with customers reliant on their resident Crystal Reports wizards in order to make sense of that data. Of course this is somewhat of a double-edged sword for Novell, since existing customers will be wondering what this means for their existing investment in Novell Audit. No doubt Novell will respond with some attractive upgrade packages. Secondly, it bulks up Novell's offerings as it faces up to IBM in identity management - IBM's December
acquisiton of Micromuse brought with it one of the leaders in security and event management in GuardedNet.
Novell has done a good job in the first 4 months since the acquisition and the integration adds to already comprehensive identity management portfolio. There is still some way to go though if it is to maximise the return on its $72M and integrate it with the rest of the Novell portfolio. I still have my doubts, however, whether that portfolio has the breadth and credibility for the company to position itself against the likes of IBM to address organisations' broader security and event monitoring requirements.
