Verizon Enterprise Solutions and Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) have teamed up to offer an identity and access management service that will help enterprises make their cloud-based applications and services more secure.

As enterprises move to cloud-based services, it becomes more important that they shield those services from improper access, while making sure "the right people have access to the right resources" any time they need them, says Mark Shapiro, senior strategist for identity access management at Verizon.

"We talk a lot about the extended enterprise and being able to open it up to partners, suppliers and customers so that everyone can do their jobs more effectively," Shapiro says. "But that kind of openness can create a lot more opportunities for people to exploit weaknesses."

Novell and Verizon teamed up to create an "identity-as-a-service" offering by combining Verizon's security expertise and infrastructure and management capabilities with Novell's identity and security software capabilities.

"This is an on-demand service that give enterprises more control and tighter security and lets them extend access to their cloud-based services beyond their organizational boundaries," Shapiro said. "At the same time, it simplifies things for users -- from their perspective, they just log in once and gain access to the things they need."

The Verizon Secure Access services give enterprises a centralized location for managing single sign-in identities across their applications, via a portal.

"Traditionally, different applications -- payroll, sales force management, etc. -- become silos," Shapiro says. "This enables organizations to have one queue and to establish policy across their enterprise applications."

That includes Web-based apps, proprietary applications such as SharePoint, and Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Networks (SSL-VPNs), all of which can be tied into the single identity management service, Shapiro says. The service accomplishes this without requiring new hardware at the premises, new agents, or major new software reconfigurations, he promises.

As part of this announcement, Novell is using Verizon as its managed service provider for identity management. The two companies also plan to work together on future cloud-based offerings.

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading