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| Secure Identity Management Overview Course | ||
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| March 2003 | ||
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| DeveloperNet University Course | ||
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From the Laboratory to Production
Novell Nsure Resources is a member of the Novell Nsure family of secure identity management solutions. Novell combines products, services, and partnerships to help organizations plan and deploy complete business solutions based on Nsure secure identity management.
Novell Nsure Resources gives an organization a head start on addressing the challenge of cost-effectively delivering real-time, role-based resources to its distributed workforce, partners and customers from any location--wired or wireless--yet keep the organization's systems safe and secure.
To get the most from Nsure Resources, Novell recommends taking a phased approach to its deployment and its transition from a laboratory system to a full production secure identity management solution. Novell consultants and Novell partners are available to provide expert assistance for any or all of the phases.
The recommended phases are discussed individually in the remainder of this section.
Determine How Novell Nsure Resource Fits
Once the organization has successfully implemented the Novell Nsure Resources in a laboratory environment, Novell recommends consulting with an Nsure Resources expert (Novell consultant or Novell Consulting Systems Integration partner) to help in determining how Nsure Resources can best be employed in the organization's business and technology environments. (Novell is in the process of extending Nsure Resources support to a variety of disparate systems, applications and platforms.)
Conduct a Formal Kick-off Meeting
Conduct a kick-off meeting to engage all impacted departments, decision makers, managers and executives to bring them into alignment for implementing Novell Nsure Resources. This is a critical step in that it is essential to have everyone in the company completely aligned before continuing. Appropriate signatures should be obtained from representatives from each affected organization, department or system. A signature page helps reduce potential problems in the event of changes in regime or systems.
Assess Requirements
Assess business requirements to identify policies, processes and technical requirements, then map the Novell Nsure Resources functionality to these business needs. The assessment process may include the following tasks:
- Define the organization's business requirements
- Analyze the organization's business processes
- Create a data flow diagram
Once the requirements have been determined, evaluate the readiness of the technical environment to support the rollout to the production environment and determine what is required to bring the staff up to speed. Based on these findings, establish the scope and create a project plan for implementation. Be sure to include any prerequisite activities.
Prepare a Design Plan
When designing the Novell Nsure Resources environment, consider such issues as account systems, authoritative sources, messaging systems, and licensing and activation issues. It may help to include various test scenarios in the design plan to test for desired outcomes for both data and events.
It may be of value to document the design of the planned deployment to provide the organization with a clear picture of the business processes, the requirements for implementing provisioning to support these processes, and ownership of the common data to be synchronized across the system. Signatures on all documents by representatives from all affected systems are helpful during this phase. Signatures help to ensure that all parties have a chance to review the design and commit to the deployment.
Build and Test a Real-World Production Pilot
A proof of concept is performed during this phase. The pilot environment enables the organization to test the production candidate with minimum impact on the production environment. The organization can test the business procedures outlined in the requirements assessment and design plan, and can correct any problems identified during testing. The design document should be updated to reflect any changes made during final system testing.
The experience gained through the production pilot may indicate that the requirements assessment document and the design plan need refinement. This may necessitate extra time and effort to update the impacted documents and processes. By employing an iterative process, however, the organization can improve efficiencies and realize additional economies.
Deploy the Nsure Resources Solution
Roll out the identity management system to the entire enterprise or to a particular segment of the enterprise. Documentation that was developed and fine-tuned during the production pilot laboratory phase may be useful in this step.
Let's now look at the award-winning Novell products, that make up the Nsure solution, in greater detail.
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