Understanding Different Oracle IAM Solutions And Their Capabilities

Shiv Sujir - April 04, 2022

Oracle provides capabilities for managing the entire lifecycle of user identities and entitlements across multiple environments, including on-premises data centers and cloud environments. Organizations leverage Oracle IAM solutions to simplify compliance and strengthen the security of cloud and enterprise systems. The Oracle IAM platform includes various features for access management, identity governance, and directory services. It regulates access to data, systems, and networks and streamlines identity tasks to minimize repetitive changes to users, roles, and groups across multiple environments.

Basic Components Of IAM

IAM frameworks allow IT teams to control how users access critical information in company systems and networks. IAM products typically provide role-based access control, allowing system administrators to manage access to networks or systems based on roles assigned to each user in the organization.

Access in this context refers to an individual’s ability to perform a task—for example, viewing, creating, modifying, or deleting a file. The admin may define roles according to the job description, responsibilities, or authority of individuals within the organization.

An IAM system should provide the following capabilities:

Capturing and recording user login details
Managing the user identity database
Assigning roles to users and entities
Removing the access privileges of inactive users or users who switch roles
Enabling visibility and oversight over all user access privileges via a central directory

Many organizations assign digital identities to non-human entities. IAM manages digital identities for applications and devices to establish their trustworthiness.

Identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) and authentication-as-a-service offerings can handle identity and access management in cloud environments. With either option, third-party service providers are responsible for registering and authenticating users and managing IAM information.

Oracle Identity And Access Management Solutions

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IAM

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IAM is a cloud-native identity and access management service providing capabilities essential for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It has adaptive features and access policies supporting various IT use cases. Oracle enables administrators to rapidly onboard new users and services while addressing the organization’s changing security needs.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IAM offers customers the maximum level of transparency and control over the applications they run in the cloud. It provides the following capabilities:

Customer isolation—organizations can deploy their applications and data assets in isolated environments. Each customer benefits from the security of a dedicated environment with isolation from other Oracle tenants and between workloads.

Constant encryption—consistently protects at-rest customer data and HTTPS-based public APIs.

Intuitive IAM policies—administrators can easily control access to services and segregate roles and responsibilities, reducing the risk of unintentional or malicious user activity that may damage the organization.

Identity federation—leverages existing user and group identities in Oracle.

Security zone policies—ensure that cloud resources comply with the best practices and security standards applying to the organization (i.e., encryption, network access, etc.).

Configuration vulnerability detection—identifies security issues in resource configurations.

Behavior monitoring—identify risky actions by end-users and operators.

Logging—provides comprehensive log data for monitoring and auditing purposes, helping to manage and reduce operational risks.

Fault-independent data center—enables scalability and high availability, providing resilience against network attacks and preventing downtime during a breach or disaster.

Third-party software support—customers can leverage external solutions to protect their resources and data in the cloud.

Oracle security—Oracle has rigorous security standards enforced with certifications and audits. Customers can demonstrate their compliance to auditors, regulators, and relevant stakeholders.

Oracle Access Management

Oracle Access Management allows customers to seamlessly integrate their systems and identities across their on-premise and cloud-based environments. It offers comprehensive, risk-aware, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO). Customers can enhance these capabilities with microservices and deploy them as images in the Oracle cloud infrastructure or proprietary data centers.

Oracle Access Management provides the flexibility to migrate an existing platform to the cloud and control access. Organizations can apply policies to users that remain effective across all locations and devices, ensuring secure and easy access.

Capabilities include:

User-based access policies—these simple policies follow users through different environments and devices, leveraging SSO to provide seamless access while maintaining security.

MFA—combines multiple authentication methods to secure various applications and systems. The addition of email, SMS, or key-based verification provides increased security compared to relying on a password. Organizations can use REST APIs and the Admin UI to make administration easier.

Risk management—customers can use Oracle Adaptive Risk Management to aggregate dynamic risk data related to device and user behavior. It is easy to detect, control, and respond to activities that represent a higher risk to help prevent fraud. This feature can analyze behavioral patterns to detect anomalies automatically.

Zero trust—organizations can enforce a zero trust security strategy across diverse, distributed systems while providing a seamless user experience using features such as identity federation, SSO, and adaptive authentication. Enterprise-wide SSO is possible using open standards such as AML, OpenID Connect, and OAuth.

Cross-environment access management—customers can use the Open Application Model (OAM) to rapidly deploy and easily scale Oracle Access Management instances in the cloud or on-premises (with Kubernetes or Docker images). This service offers global data center support, high availability, and failover, allowing customers to focus on their business needs while relying on the IAM solution’s resiliency.

Oracle Identity Governance

Oracle Identity Governance can automatically provision and de-provision users, providing actionable identity information to enable organizations to remediate high-risk user privileges quickly and easily.

Capabilities include:

Cross-environment access management—reduce cost and complexity with an easy-to-use access catalog that suggests access and provisioning requests based on role and entitlements. Utilizing self-service features, users can initiate application onboarding for on-premises and cloud applications using Rest APIs and an extensive set of connectors.

Workflow flexibility—the self-service portal allows users to author enterprise-wide access policies using customizable workflows for onboarding and onboarding applications and users. Organizations can leverage their existing identities and associated roles and privileges to enable rapid onboarding.

Intelligent role mining for RBAC—customers can identify typical access patterns across user groups with role mining. They can use Oracle Identity Role Intelligence to automatically publish roles to Oracle Identity Governance (OIG) and ensure optimized role-based access control (RBAC) using Oracle’s data mining module.

Granular privilege management—customizable application, privilege, user, or role-based certifications allow organizations to accelerate their compliance procedures and meet security objectives with granular privilege management. Audit-based assessments focusing on risky access privileges or specific regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR) can help identify and adjust policies that fail to meet compliance requirements.

Oracle Unified Directory

Oracle Unified Directory is a comprehensive Oracle directory solution for identity management. It provides a unified solution encompassing all the necessary services for scaling enterprise directories and ensuring high performance.

Capabilities include:

Elastic scalability—Oracle Unified Directory can support billions of devices and users, enabling organizations to grow without over-provisioning resources. It minimizes the impact on existing services while scaling, offering high availability and SLAs to support large deployments.

Unified directory services—enterprises can use Oracle Unified Directory (or the Oracle Directory Integration Platform) to unify Java-based directory services and store, synchronize, and virtualize directories. It has a flexible architecture and allows customers to optimize and accelerate their application deployments and identity management projects, reducing the total cost of ownership.

Directory services for heterogeneous environments—Unified Directory is easy to install and has a small footprint, offering multiple deployment options. An independent software vendor (ISV) can bundle directories into its applications. Users can easily install and configure the directory within minutes. Oracle Unified Directory offers a smooth user experience with a common GUI and an advanced CLI with interactive mode.

Oracle Security With Pathlock

Pathlock provides a suite of solutions that enable you to control access and manage risk across your Oracle applications. In addition to enabling SSO through native SAML integration, Pathlock also automates Segregation of Duties and User Access Reviews to help prevent fraud and reduce your compliance and administrative overheads.

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