Today Novell announced the general availability of Novell Identity Manager 4 Advanced Edition.  As Novell's "WorkloadIQ Guy," I thought I'd share a post from my blog about why identity management is central to WorkloadIQ. And since it's baseball playoff season, I think comic geniuses Bud Abbott and Lou Costello explain it best, “look Abbott, if you’re the coach, you must know all the players.”

Their classic Who’s on First routine can depict what it’s like to attempt a move to cloud computing without first establishing an enterprise-ready identity foundation.

Before you consider moving workloads around, you need to know who has access to what, what proprietary data is in the workload, what will happen once the workload has executed—as well as a host of other important characteristics and processes necessary to ensure reliable performance, security and policy compliance.

Identifying who has access is well understood. Employees, partners and vendors all have identities at this point, and most organizations understand their roles. Companies have invested millions of dollars to define policies that limit what people in these roles can and can’t do.

Identities must go beyond who to include what. That’s because you must be able to manage what people have access to. Therefore, identities must include technologies—everything from desktops, laptops, printers, databases, storage devices, line-of business applications—the list goes on to include virtual resources as well.

Identity is the common characteristic that spans all information systems—both physical and virtual—which is why Novell believes identity is the point of integration for intelligent workload management. Identity management products such as Novell Identity Manager 4 greatly simplify this process by automating provisioning, user access and policy management. Not only does identity manager provide a standard view of identity across physical, virtual and cloud environments, it integrates with security information and event management (SIEM) products such as Novell Sentinel and SIEM products from other vendors to ensure policy compliance and increase management control.

The process of integrating identity with today’s network-connected resources can be an arduous task. Identity Manager 4 greatly simplifies identity integration, offering plug-and-play integration drivers for more than 300 leading business applications, databases, email systems, directories, operating systems and phone systems.

Establishing an enterprise-ready identity foundation provides significant benefits today to help you control costs, manage complexity, ensure compliance with business and regulatory mandates, and protect your company’s intellectual property. Regardless of where you are with cloud-deployment today, infusing your enterprise with identity intelligence will help you push intelligent workloads beyond your firewall with confidence when you’re ready. Without errors or confusion.