It's an ongoing struggle: the time-consuming manual processes and skyrocketing costs of provisioning access to resources across all systems, applications and devices in your enterprise. But Novell® Identity Manager 3 simplifies the process of identity management. It provides automated user provisioning and password management throughout the user lifecycle—delivering first-day access to new users, modifying or rescinding access as necessary across all systems, and synchronizing multiple passwords into a single strong password. With Identity Manager you can control user administration costs, eliminate complex manual processes, and enforce security enterprise-wide—all while delivering the right resources so your users can do their jobs.

Novell Identity Manager automates complex provisioning processes so your users have immediate access to resources across the enterprise. With role-based provisioning you can assign resources to your users based on business roles and policies. New employees are granted access to all the resources they need on their first day on the job, and all necessary approval workflows are automated. Identity Manager also makes it easy for business managers and departments to manage their own users' access needs instead of having to rely on a network administrator. When roles change, access rights are updated automatically. And when an employee leaves, access is revoked in real time. With role-based provisioning, systems are never vulnerable, and companies can maintain visibility into how information and resources are being used.

With Identity Manager, you can synchronize a user's passwords to provide a single password to all systems. Users are more likely to remember a single password—but if they don't, they can receive hints or change the password through self-service capabilities. Users can also manage their passwords using the native password interfaces in systems such as Microsoft Windows. This automated password management relieves a great deal of the burden on your IT department.

Self-service password management reduces helpdesk calls and increases user productivity. And with Identity Manager, you can ensure that passwords your users set are secure: you can create and enforce strong, system-wide password policies to protect your company against password-related attacks.

As your company's business grows, your user base grows and your business environment becomes increasingly complex. With Identity Manager you can reduce the administrative burden of entering, updating and deleting user information across all your systems.

Because Identity Manager links core employee resource systems such as human resources, e-mail, phone, directory and network operating systems, all accounts and services are automatically created and ordered when an identity attribute is entered in a designated authoritative source. This eliminates the expensive and time-consuming process of manually entering and updating user identity on multiple systems, and reduces the possibility of data errors.

To help companies further reduce the complexity of deploying and managing an identity-management solution, Designer for Identity Manager offers visual configuration tools that provide a simple yet powerful way to design and configure Identity Manager implementations. With Designer, users can do the following:

• Graphically model the implementation
• Re-use configurations to help reduce deployment timeframes
• Create and test “what-if” scenarios before deploying in production to ensure proper policy definition
• Automatically generate project documentation of all implementation details
• Use the offline mode to safely configure implementations outside of the production environment
• Maintain project version control
• Define and manage policies such as data transformation, placement and matching

Former employees are a common security risk for any enterprise, but Identity Manager eliminates this chronic concern. The moment an employee’s status is changed to “dismissed” in the human resources database or any other authoritative source, resource access is automatically rescinded. Your confidential resources remain safe.

Of course, while only the right people should have access to your information, you must also be able to prove that this is so. An auditable identity-management solution is a critical component of any regulatory compliance plan. Fortunately, Identity Manager includes Novell Audit Starter Pack capabilities for centralized logging of all identity-management activities. Pre-configured reports include a list of all users with access to a particular system, and of all resources provided to any user. Novell Identity Manager can also issue alerts when inappropriate access is granted. You can act immediately to protect your company from costly security breaches and litigation.