Identity Management 101

Hi, my name is Amit Jasuja. I'm the vice president of product management at Oracle, and over the next few minutes we're going to be talking about Identity Management 101. Over the last few years, we've seen an increase 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 roll in protecting your enterprise from such risks.

Identity management has three key components that we're going to focus on. The first one is access management. Within access management we are looking at authentication, single sign-on, authorization, and federation. Access management is really all about making sure that you know who your users are and what they're authorized to do within your enterprise. Also important is to make sure that these users can access all of your business applications, including those of your partners, without having to type their passwords over, and over again.

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

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

Also, because this is mission-critical, 24 by seven infrastructure, you need to have the right manageability tools. With a solid identity management foundation in your enterprise, now what you can drive are some of the key benefits like, improved security; you can lower your administrative costs; and improve the productivity of your employees.

And now that you know the key benefits and you're ready to make a decision, let's talk about some of the key factors in deciding what is the right solution for you. The first piece is heterogeneity. You need to make sure that your product works across all of your existing infrastructure for your data, your business applications, and your infrastructure. It's based on open standards, and it is extensible. The second item is integrated. All the different components of your identity management stack need to work well together. And finally, it's about scalability. You're running your business on it. The infrastructure needs to be scalable to meet the needs of your growing enterprise.

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