As Published In November/December 2003

Identity Management in Oracle 10g

By Fred Sandsmark

Single infrastructure now manages security for all Oracle products.

Who are you? It's a question Oracle users are constantly asked by dozens of login screens every day. "The most important thing in any security consideration is the concept of who—the identity," says Uppili Srinivasan, director of Oracle's Identity Management and Security Products. It's Srinivasan's job to help Oracle customers evoke the most secure and useful answer to the question.

Srinivasan is ideally suited for the task, having worked on Oracle's security-related products for more than a decade. He was one of the first engineers to work on Oracle Internet Directory (OID), the precursor to the new Oracle Identity Management 10g—a single security infrastructure that works with all products in the Oracle technology stack. Identity Management promises to make Oracle systems simpler to administer, more cost-effective to operate, and more secure.

Beyond maintaining a central, shared repository for identity information, Oracle Identity Management allows for delegated administrative services, so users can self-manage their user identities across the Oracle stack—even when requirements vary from product to product. "There are product-specific security notions," Srinivasan says, "but they all depend upon the Identity Management infrastructure to help them recognize who users are and what permissions they have."

Srinivasan points out that Oracle Identity Management goes beyond a typical directory. "It remains a standards-based directory, but at the same time it leverages all the back-end capabilities of the Oracle database," he says. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) v3 and X.509 v3 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards are not only followed but are enhanced by Oracle's own technology stack.

With Oracle Database 10g, that stack now includes on-demand grid capabilities. "Identity management infrastructure, by virtue of being a centralized, shared infrastructure, facilitates scaling to the grid," Srinivasan says. "Because Oracle Identity Management is implemented in a grid-aware fashion, it too can scale on the grid. The identity management infrastructure itself can be instantiated on multiple nodes."

Partner-Powered

This architecture results in a security infrastructure that's tailor-made for the distributed, heterogeneous environments in today's enterprises. It also provides many opportunities for Oracle to work with top provisioning and access control partners by providing a single point of integration between all Oracle products and partner solutions.

Next Steps Learn more about Oracle Identity Management oracle.com/solutions/security/idm_home.html otn.oracle.com/products/id_mgmt/index.html Attend an Oracle Identity Management iSeminar oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar.html?2083066

"The typical organization has about 75 applications," says Jim D'Addario, senior director of product marketing for provisioning partner Thor Technologies. "So we enable Oracle to connect and provision to the non-Oracle world." Thor's product, Xellerate, takes information from other products' directories and centralizes it in OID—making OID the system of record for the entire organization.

Oracle partner Netegrity relies on Oracle Identity Management for its access control product, IdentityMinder. "We bridge enterprise needs with Oracle needs," says Amit Jasuja, Netegrity's vice president for product management. "We can interoperate with the Oracle single sign-on (SSO) and the Oracle directory products, and we can extend enterprise single sign-on needs beyond the Oracle stack to all the other assets."

"From a data management standpoint, I look at OID and the Oracle database as best-in-class," Jasuja continues. "Our product relies on a database underneath it, and Oracle is one of the data management repositories we support."

Real-World-Driven

Partner integration and built-in synchronization drive Oracle's goal of making identity management meet real-world customer needs. "We know there's going to be a broad spectrum of customer deployment requirements," Srinivasan says, "and there is no single out-of-the-box way" to deploy a product like Oracle Identity Management. "So we derived our deployment model from the experience of how Oracle products really get applied in customer environments."