An Identity Management
Evolution
Oracle Identity Management 11g delivers service-oriented
security, native integration across the suite, and hot-
pluggability so components can be added on as needed.
Oracle recently announced Oracle Identity Management 11g, a
comprehensive product suite that
includes identity management, access
management, identity analytics, directory
services, identity federation, entitlements,
information rights management, and more.
Caroline Kvitka, Oracle Magazine senior
managing editor, sat down with Amit Jasuja,
vice president of development, identity
management and security products, at
Oracle, to get the details. The following is an
excerpt from that interview. Download the
full podcast at oracle.com/magcasts.
Oracle Magazine: Why is identity management important, and how has it evolved in
the last few years?
Jasuja: Identity management is a core infrastructure requirement. Companies need to
secure who has access to business applications and information, and identity management delivers on that need. Looking at how
things have evolved, identity management
has gone from being a nice-to-have technology to a must-have. It’s become more of
a compliance-driven mandate as opposed to
what used to be mostly a nice-to-have cost
avoidance or productivity tool.
As regulatory pressure continues to grow,
businesses need to be able to control and
continuously monitor who has access to
what. As the threat landscape changes and
people are more worried about cybersecurity
and identity theft, what was traditionally a
single-sign-on solution needs to evolve to a
risk-based access control solution.
BOB ADLER
Oracle Magazine: How does Oracle Identity
Management 11 g address the evolving needs
of business?
Jasuja: There are three important aspects
of Oracle Identity Management 11 g that I’d
like to highlight. The first is service-oriented
security. Instead of delivering identity man-
agement as a set of siloed technologies that
do access control, provisioning, and direc-
tory all separately, Oracle has delivered all
of these capabilities as a set of services that
are integrated, standards based, and ready
to be rapidly deployed to secure business
applications. We expect companies with
thousands of business applications to be
able to integrate them with Oracle Identity
Management 11 g very quickly.
Amit Jasuja, Vice President of Development, Identity
Management and Security Products, at Oracle
So if you want to use the password expiration detection capabilities of Oracle Access
Management Suite with the password reset
capabilities of Oracle Identity Manager,
these two components of Oracle Identity
Management 11 g are already designed to
work together.
Third, all of the Oracle Identity
Management 11 g products are hot pluggable, meaning that they don’t all have to
be deployed at the same time. They can be
deployed in a piecemeal fashion, which is
important for a lot of companies, because
often budgets are limited. Also, if a company
wants to leverage its existing identity management technologies, it can layer just the
new Oracle Identity Management 11 g components that are needed on top.
Oracle Magazine: What is an example of
service-oriented security in action?
Jasuja: One of the examples that I like to
use is that of developing any new application. Within companies, there’s often a set
of applications that are delivered out of the
box, such as PeopleSoft or Siebel applications, but then there are hundreds more
applications that companies are building
on their own using infrastructure like Oracle
WebLogic Server or IBM WebSphere. All of
these applications need to be integrated with
the identity infrastructure.
With Oracle Identity Management 11g,
we have exposed all the basic building
blocks of identity management—including
authentication, authorization policies
around who can access what, roles, and so
on—as a service, allowing companies to
develop applications rapidly and securely
as they integrate them with their identity
management infrastructure. So their appli-
