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Oracle’s New Identity Management Road Map: Service-Oriented Security, Role Management, Cross-Platform Commitment
Oracle’s road map to enterprisewide identify management (IdM) for the next five years will consist of a larger strategy called service-oriented security that supports multivendor environments.
The core of the strategy will be the ongoing adoption of Web services standards for Oracle’s key IdM and security components. Web services standards enable the modules to work within a plug-and-play framework for enterprise applications from Oracle or others.
“By using a centralized service-oriented security model, applications just need to call a Web service to authenticate or authorize users, perform an audit, or provision someone’s access rights,” says Hormazd Romer, Oracle director of product marketing.
According to industry analysts, centralized frameworks promise to relieve many of the IdM challenges large organizations face today. "Although many companies have invested heavily in point solutions for security, they are still experiencing security and privacy events related to access controls and segregation of duties conflicts," says Gary Loveland, principal, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "An integrated approach to role management and deployment of automated solutions can help companies proactively manage these risks while reducing the overall cost and complexity created by overlapping and redundant oversight functions."
Tied to Oracle’s road map announcement is the introduction of the first product to conform to that vision. Oracle Role Manager, an offering within the Oracle Identity Management component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, helps manage organizational relationships, roles, and associated privileges for improved security and regulatory compliance.
Role Manager works with identity-management tools to externalize role definitions and memberships for each application in an organization. Roles have formerly had to be hard coded into each program, leading to inconsistent policy enforcement and maintenance headaches. “With Role Manager, Oracle is moving those authorizations into a central repository that acts as an authoritative source for business role information,” Romer says.
Centralization also will help facilitate the automation of business processes that cross multiple applications. “Organizations can now automate approvals for workflow processes where hard coding approvers used to be brittle and break down as people changed jobs,” Romer adds.
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