1.1 Product Overview

Certain situations open potential back doors into systems and increase the likelihood of a security breach in an enterprise network. For example, when running some commands that require elevated privileges, users sometimes get exposed to the superuser or root account credentials. Similarly, passwords are often not changed when a user is no more performing the administrative role.

Novell Privileged User Manager helps IT administrators manage the identity and access for superuser and root accounts by providing controlled superuser access to administrators, allowing them to perform jobs without needlessly exposing root account credentials. It also provides a centralized activity log across multiple platforms. The introduction of Novell Privileged User Manager enriches the Novell Identity and Access Management and Compliance Management solutions by adding auditing and tracking capabilities for privileged user activity across the organization.

Novell Privileged User Manager limits corporate susceptibility to unauthorized transactions and information access by helping organizations rapidly deploy superuser management and tracking across all UNIX and Linux environments. It reduces management overhead and infrastructure costs, controls and records which privileged users have access to what, and reduces costs and errors through demonstrable compliance audits.

Novell Privileged User Manager works by delegating privileged access, which is authorized via a centralized database. The end result is that a user is authorized to run the privileged command and all activity is logged. The centralized database provides for easier administration. Compared to competitive solutions in the marketplace, Novell Privileged User Manager is deployed more quickly, provides faster response time, better logging and auditing and improved administration, and leads to a more secure system and a fast return on investment.