Novell, SAP bring together security, compliance wares

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The two vendors are to certify each other's technology

By John Fontana | Framingham | Thursday, 15 October, 2009

SAP and Novell have announced a partnership to integrate, certify and support their respective security and identity technology and governance, risk and compliance software.

Novell has integrated and certified its Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP, Novell Identity Manager and Novell Sentinel to work with SAP's Business Objects GRC Access Control. In the next 30 days, that certification will extend to the other two applications in SAP's Business Objects governance, risk and compliance (GRC) suite — Process Control and Risk Management.

"We cover the entire stack of GRC from applications to IT controls," says Ranga Bodla, senior director for governance, risk and compliance for SAP.

The Novell software provides user provisioning, access control and security event monitoring, while the SAP tools address risk and access management, data monitoring and compliance management and reporting.

The two vendors hope the integration lets IT reduce costs and infrastructure by combining IT access controls and business process controls in a single integrated system. In essence, the two are creating a hub for defining security, identity and GRC across a network.

"Users can synchronize across not only SAP applications but across all applications," says Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager for identity and security at Novell. "So processes and policies in SAP Access Control can be mapped to another enterprise application with the same access controls tightly linked."

The partnership between the two vendors began early last year when Novell also announced a partnership to optimize SAP on SuSE Linux Enterprise and with Novell's virtualisation and identity platforms. The companies also said they would optimize Novell's operating system for SAP's datacentre infrastructure.