Blog Entry

“The real truth about public cloud services is that the biggest barrier to entry isn’t security. The biggest barrier is compliance.”
–Christofer Hoff, Director of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at Cisco Systems

CIOs love the cloud concept: on-demand resources that combine unparalleled flexibility with incredible cost predictability. Switching from CAPEX to OPEX allows companies to reduce costs; the company isn’t stuck with unneeded hardware or long-term service contracts.

What’s not to love about the cloud? Well, there’s still that whole compliance issue.

Novell-SAP Partnership Drives Compliance

To support your customers’ compliance concerns when moving workloads into the cloud, in late 2009, Novell and SAP expanded their partnership. Thanks to tighter integration between Novell Identity and Security and SAP Governance, Risk and Compliance products, customers can map what is actually occurring in their enterprises to real business objectives. This allows them to better understand business risks and mitigate those risks before they impact their businesses—improving both security and compliance.

Enabling Higher ROI

Turnkey integration with SAP applications allows you to provide very attractive ROI to customers. With a more robust, secure and compliant solution, your customers are now not only able to integrate the disparate systems scattered across their enterprises, but also integrate their workloads that are living in the cloud. As a result, customers cut compliance costs and show greater ROI on everything they do—without impacting business productivity.

Continuous Compliance Returns Greater Business Value

Perhaps the best benefit of strengthening the combined Novell-SAP solution is that customers can leverage their existing compliance infrastructure and drive toward continuous compliance. By integrating access controls with real-time security and identity management, customers gain better visibility for proactively managing risk.

Adding Value for Customers

Novell recognizes today’s budget realities. As a Novell Partner, I’m sure you do, too. Working together, we can help our joint customers deploy the solutions they need at a pace that makes sense for them. They can get started with just one or two offerings. And over time, they can move toward the complete solution.

As the cloud evolves, there will be many opportunities for partners to add value for customers, as they begin searching for ways to:

• Monitor processes to assess risks
• Set up controls to contain those risks
• Take actions to address risks in real time—before the damage is done
• Let’s keep the conversation going.

–Rich

Read more about this topic:

• Novell Compliance Management Platform
• Novell and SAP
• SAP and Novell Expand Global Partnership To Help Customers Deliver Confident Business And It Governance, Risk And Compliance Programs