Identity Management 101

Hi, my name is Amit Jasuja. I'm the vice president ofproduct management at Oracle, and over the next few minutes we're going to betalking about Identity Management 101. Over the last few years, we've seen anincrease in the number of security breaches with things like identity theft,and what we're going to talk about is how identity management can play a rollin protecting your enterprise from such risks.

Identity management has three key components that we'regoing to focus on. The first one is access management. Within access managementwe are looking at authentication, single sign-on, authorization, andfederation. Access management is really all about making sure that you know whoyour users are and what they're authorized to do within your enterprise. Alsoimportant is to make sure that these users can access all of your businessapplications, including those of your partners, without having to type theirpasswords over, and over again.

The second area we're going to talk about is identityadministration. Within identity administration, we're looking at self-service,delegation, user and role management, provisioning and reconciliation, andfinally, work flow. With your enterprise and all your business applications,you need to make sure that you can manage these users effectively. So this isall about effective administration of those users and their rights. It's alsoabout making sure that you have the ability to approve and find out who hasaccess to what critical systems.

The third and the final area is directory storage. Within directorystorage, what we're looking at are three areas again. It's scalable, securestorage for your identity information - that's an LDAP server. It'smeta-directory, and it's about virtual directory so you can integrate thatidentity data quickly and efficiently with your business applications. So we'veestablished what identity management is, but what we cannot forget is that it'salso about compliance. And so we need to make sure that your infrastructure hasthe right framework to drive auditing and compliance.

Also, because this is mission-critical, 24 by seveninfrastructure, you need to have the right manageability tools. With a solididentity management foundation in your enterprise, now what you can drive aresome of the key benefits like, improved security; you can lower youradministrative costs; and improve the productivity of your employees.

And now that you know the key benefits and you're ready tomake a decision, let's talk about some of the key factors in deciding what isthe right solution for you. The first piece is heterogeneity. You need to makesure that your product works across all of your existing infrastructure foryour data, your business applications, and your infrastructure. It's based onopen standards, and it is extensible. The second item is integrated. All thedifferent components of your identity management stack need to work welltogether. And finally, it's about scalability. You're running your business onit. The infrastructure needs to be scalable to meet the needs of your growingenterprise.

So, today we have learned about what identity management is,we understand the benefits of identity management, and some of the key factorsin deciding the right infrastructure for you. To learn more about how Oraclecan help you with your identity management needs, please visit us atOracle.com/identity.