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Don't Fall Behind the Identity Management Learning Curve
Today's best identity management software is designed to do a lot more than authorize users for a single application. The podcast Identity Management 101 walks you through the current world of identity management (IdM) and shows you how it automates processes, saves money, and makes it easier to deliver the information your compliance auditor is looking for.
Directory Services
A directory is, of course, the database where you keep user information (name, password, manager, and so on). It used to be that every application had its own user directory. Now, with more people depending on more online applications, managing all those directories has become complex and costly. Today's best IdM solutions centralize user identity information so that many applications draw from one or a few directories. One directory is easier to maintain and easier to mine for compliance information.
Oracle Identity Management supports all leading directories and—with the addition of Oracle Virtual Directory—enables multiple LDAP directories or relational databases to act as a single, large, and unified LDAP store. Oracle also offers its own highly scalable Oracle Internet Directory, a full-featured LDAPv3 server implemented on the Oracle Database.
Access Control and Single Sign-On
After you store your user account information in a directory, you can authorize access to enterprise applications. Access control software validates user identity (user name and password) and then authorizes access. The best IdM software authorizes access to a host of applications with a single sign-on. With Oracle's single sign-on solutions, users log in once and get access to all the enterprise resources available to them. Single sign-on delivers improved security, productivity, and dramatic cost savings by reducing the time spent addressing password reset and update issues. Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite are market-leading solutions for enterprise identity management.
Identity Administration
Once you have a sign-on process in place, you need a process to govern how digital identities, groups, and organizations are created, maintained, and leveraged throughout your organization. The best IdM software provides a simple, controlled means of changing the user, role, group, and organization information that affects access privileges. For example, Oracle Identity Management allows IT administrators to securely delegate administration to business managers who are closer to each user, so information is updated quickly and accurately. In addition, Web-based self-service features such as password resets and account requests reduce the huge costs associated with help desks.
User Provisioning
User provisioning software adds another layer of automation that saves money, improves security, and will make you a star with your compliance auditors. User provisioning automates the tedious process of adding, updating, and deleting user accounts to multiple applications and directories. As roles, rules, and policies evolve, the rights and attributes of users can change—and a workflow-controlled, automated provisioning process can significantly improve the efficiency of managing those changes. Oracle Identity Manager is an industry-leading provisioning solution that helps instantly connect users to the resources they need to be productive, and it revokes unauthorized access to protect proprietary information and enhance security. In addition, automated audit reports make compliance easier and sustainable.
Federated Identity
Once you have your identity management solution in place, you can use it to improve the way you work with business partners and other organizations within your enterprise. Many interactions between business partners are still executed manually. The lack of a consistent and mutually acceptable security model has been one of the major barriers to automation. With federated identity, the task of administering access between organizations can be delegated on prenegotiated access terms. Once a user is logged into your enterprise applications, you can pass a secure validation to a partner's application for that user. Partner employees can likewise be validated into your applications—without the burden of managing their identity and credential information in both places. Sensitive business information remains secure and accessible only by authorized internal personnel, but partners can access the information they need to streamline their interactions with your organization, such as reviewing reorder status, receiving online training, and accessing partner-centric applications and information. This drastically reduces the cost and complexity of managing partners' users and accelerates the adoption of networked business portals. Oracle Identity Federation is the industry's first standalone, simple-to-deploy, fully functional federation server.
Web Services Security
As more organizations adopt service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services security is the logical next step for your identity management solution. In an SOA, Web services expose business applications and information to other business applications and the internet for use by customers, business partners, and employees. The best IdM software provides a robust, secure framework for managing access control and for monitoring and auditing these services. Oracle Web Services Manager is at the forefront of the emerging Web services market, providing solutions for service-enabled identity management and identity-driven SOA management.
Oracle Identity Management
Oracle Identity Management's best-in-class suite of IdM solutions allows enterprises to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of user identities across all enterprise resources, both within and beyond the firewall. You can now deploy applications faster, apply the most granular protection to enterprise resources, automatically eliminate latent access privileges, and much more.
To find out more about identity management visit oracle.com/identity to view product information and a complete IdM resource library.
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