Recently Oracle announced the release of Oracle Identity Management 11g Release 2 (Oracle IdM 11gR2), the most prestigious and awaited release of the Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) suite. Oracle’s latest release is the gateway into a new era in the way enterprises deploy Identity and Access Management solutions for enhancing user experience, securing the disappearing enterprise perimeter and increasing operational efficiencies. Here is my first post in the two part series, where I discuss the impact of Oracle IdM 11gR2 in the Enterprise IAM product space and the most important features that you can look forward to.
Bringing Innovation to Enterprise IAM
Seven years ago, the IAM product landscape was fragmented with a number of products offering point solutions around Directory Services, Identity Provisioning, Access Management, Governance and Federation. Against this backdrop, Oracle embarked on an ambitious journey to consolidate all its IAM offerings under the umbrella of Oracle Fusion Middleware and built a platform-based IAM solution. Oracle IdM 11gR2 incorporates customer feedback, addresses new technology challenges and stands out as one of the first comprehensive IAM offering with broad based support for the latest trends in the cloud, mobility and social domains.The cool new features introduced by Oracle IdM 11gR2 make it unique in today’s IAM product space. As discussed in the launch WebCast, the seeds of these cutting edge new features can be traced to key themes and drivers that shaped the Oracle IdM 11gR2 release.
- Simplified Experience IAM products have a reputation of not being user friendly to business users. 11gR2 aims to change this. For example when business users try to use a provisioning product to request IT resources, they come across hard-to-understand names of IT resources (e.g. clp-cert-unix-account, NL-GER-AD-Group). Oracle IdM 11gR2 addresses this problem by providing enterprises the ability to define an Entitlement Catalog and introduces the concept of a Shopping Cart to reduce the learning curve otherwise associated with the system.
- Cloud, Mobile and Social Every enterprise is looking forward to embrace cloud platforms, enabling enterprise applications to be accessible from mobile devices, harnessing the power of social media. However, these emerging trends bring in new security considerations, broadening the ambit of audit and regulatory compliance. With this in mind, Oracle IdM 11gR2 provides new ways to:
o Extend Web SSO, Federation and External Authorization capabilities
o Enable Social Sign-on (ability to login using Facebook/Google/Twitter account)
o Secure applications from rogue/jail-broken mobile devices
o Audit and monitor access to applications (who accessed which application through which device and at what time)
o Integrate mobile applications with identity services using REST APIs
- Extreme Scale Oracle IdM 11gR2 helps customers reach a new equilibrium in performance and operational scale. An Optimized Solution for Oracle Unified Directory features carrier-grade scalability and reliability that enables breakthrough performance for cloud, mobile and social ecosystems.
- Clear Upgrade Path 11gR2 provides a clear upgrade path to all 10g customers intending to modernize their existing IdM infrastructure.
Oracle IdM 11gR2 adds a new product to its portfolio known as Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM), which provides customers with the ability to easily and safely manage passwords for shared or administrative accounts associated with business applications, middleware, databases and operating systems; yet another differentiator for Oracle IdM 11gR2.
Stay tuned for the next post, where we further discuss how Oracle IdM 11gR2 will affect the Enterprise IAM deployment space
