Novell OS enables employee access to applications with single ID, password
By Elizabeth SanFilippo -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
Employees normally juggle multiple user IDs and pass-words to access applications, which results in security risks, as well as wasted time and money. As a company that continues to grow through acquisition, South Portland, Maine-based Fairchild Semiconductor knew this problem all too well.
Identity-management procedures at Fairchild's 26 facilities were manual and labor-intensive, with few security controls. Administrators spent too many work hours addressing numerous help-desk tickets from users who couldn't remember all their IDs and passwords. Fairchild, seeking to consolidate and automate its user directory, turned to Novell, whose Netware operating system (OS) already managed Fairchild's file and print services.
Novell offers a centrally managed directory that encompassed the enterprise, allowing for single user IDs and passwords for all applications. This feature isn't something many identity-management solutions offer.
"Fairchild wanted to simplify the user experience by streamlining access, while also ensuring it was automated, controllable, and auditable," says Lucy Guatta, industry manufacturing marketing manager, Novell.
Novell Identity Manager synchronizes user-identification information from HR applications, operating systems, and ERP systems—essentially anywhere identification info is stored—and places it into a metadirectory hub. "If a change is made in one system, its propagated out to all the other systems through the metadata directory foundation, which is scalable and connects all the applications," says Sarah Mees, product marketing manager at Novell.
In this way, identity management becomes an event-driven process, which Mees says is important because it doesn't leave any opportunity for risk. "When an employee leaves the company, the solution immediately cancels that users access to applications," says Mees. "This is important when there are so many users accessing confidential information."
Identity Manager established one ID and password for all applications with the creation of a single email address for each Fairchild user.
"The goal was to have a single user id for the enterprise so the user only has to remember one thing," explains Marguerite Whited, enterprise client services manager, Fairchild. "The ERP system acts like a house, and the single user ID and password are the keys to getting into that house. But what rooms you're allowed into depends on your user ID and password. If you don't have access to a particular application, that icon—or room—won't appear on your desktop."
While this implementation is ongoing, Fairchild finds it is working well with existing applications such as secure Web services and financial solutions, and operating systems like Netware, Windows, HP Ux, Sun Solaris, and Linux.
Fairchild already is seeing benefits from the new centralized environment:
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Increased security, because administrators can terminate or allow access with one click;
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Improved audit results, as reports can be flexibly deployed to meet compliance challenges such as Sarbanes-Oxley; and
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Cost-savings resulting from fewer help-desk tickets.
Whited attributes these results to a combination of the Novell solution and Fairchild's own diligence in creating standards for identity management. "The sooner a company can come up with identity-management standards, the easier they will be to implement," says Whited. "Our goal is a full provisioning environment. If you start [the process of managing IDs and passwords] in HR, it will flow downstream."
