Novell Cloud Security Service.

Novell demonstrated their advanced prototype of its Cloud Security Service, which is due for release to enterprise organisations as a product early next year.

According to Novell the new service, which has been in a private joint-development phase with hosting partners for a while now, is based on existing components used in its Access Manager, Sentinel and Identity Manager products.

Based on more than 60 cloud patents and patent applications, the service uses proxy technology to avoid exposing critical information, according to Novell. It also supports a number of industry standards used in public and private clouds.

'If you have governance, risk-management and compliance activity in your organisation, the cloud becomes absolutely seamless for you from a policy point of view — because, through the connectors, we integrate the cloud as part of your standard infrastructure. It becomes fully transparent,' said Markus Krauss, Novell's Vice President of Identity and Access Management.

Laurent Lachal, open-source research director at analyst firm Ovum, said Novell is building on its identity and access-management technology and extending it to the cloud.

'The cloud is an area where you need to have strong federation technology, where you need to expand the boundary of your trusted domain to third parties. It's a logical development in Novell's offering,' Lachal said. 'It's not a breakthrough, but it's the application of what Novell's been doing in identity and access management to cloud computing.'