Forrester and Oracle Team-up to present Total Economic Impact Report

It's still a tough economic environment and organizations we talk to are conscious of two things. How can they maximize limited resources? And, how can they maximize business impact? It is perfect timing that Andras Cser from Forrester Research and Neil Ghandi from Oracle will be presenting a free webinar on the Total Economic Impact of deploying Oracle Identity Analytics.

Her is one of the facts that emerged from the research. When teams are just sailing along implementing technology that looks good on paper it is imperative to have real customer case studies to confirm data. In this report, customer's achieved a risk adjusted ROI of 60%.

You can hear how they derived this remarkable result in the free webinar tomorrow at 12:00pm PT/3:00pm ET.

You can register here

Andras Cser,
Sr. Analyst with Forrester Research


Neil Ghandi
Product Manager, Oracle Identity Anlytics

OpenID 2.0 and Oracle Identity Federation - More Detail

Thanks to everyone for attending the webinar yesterday. Mark did a great job talking about how to build a comprehensive extranet security strategy. Get access to the replay here. He also talked a little about the OpenID 2.0 inclusion in Oracle Identity Federation.

This next blog post is for the geeks in the audience (thats a good thing). With the new support for OpenID 2.0 in OIF I wanted to share some of the documents that are available for you to configure your deployments and start using this great new feature. So, if you like diagrams like the one below there is a technical whitepaper and two configuration documents for you listed below:



Here are the other assets:

Technical Whitepaper on OpenID 2.0 in OIF

Confiuration of OpenID IdP in OIF 11gR1 PS3

Configuration of OpenID RP in OIF 11gR1 PS3

OpenID 2.0 Supported by Oracle Identity Federation

Mark Karlstrand will be giving a free webinar tomorrow, Wednesday Jan. 19 at 10:00am PT or 1:00pm ET, on how to build a complete extranet security strategy. Part of the discussion will be on how to connect to the cloud securely. This is perfect timing because the Oracle Identity Federation product team just released a feature patch that allows them to now support OpenID 2.0. You can register here for the webinar tomorrow. Below is a brief description of why this is important to companies that want to offer this service to their users.

OIF supports both Relaying Party and OpenID Provider in accordance to recent OpenID 2.0 specification. It enables organizations to start accepting OpenID from leading providers such as Yahoo and Google or to become OpenID provider in a matter of hours. With OIF users can leverage their corporate identity at OpenID-enabled blogging sites and socials networks, such as Facebook.



Custom Actions

OIF Custom Actions enable site-specific operations to be executes during federated authentication flows. It gives organizations additional flexibility to implement authentication process that meets their specific security and business needs.

Both Identity Providers and ServiceProviders can benefit by Custom Actions to streamline integrations and reduce application deployment time.

For example, Custom Actions can be used by Identity Providers to dynamically generate additional user attributes, which are not stored in directory or database. The generated attributes can be then added to an attribute statement and sent to a Service Provider. Service Providers can leverage Custom Actions to manipulate identity data received from the Identity Providers and prepare it for consumption by applications or homegrown security tools.

Developing Custom Actions does not require extensive knowledge of federation protocols; they are simple J2EE modules. Once developed, a single Custom Action can be leveraged to customize authentication flows over any protocol supported by OIF.

Hope you will join us tomorrow to discuss this great new feature in OIF.

2010 Identity Management In Review

It has been a busy year in Identity Management so I thought I would collect some of the major events that have impacted 2010. Security and Identity Management continue to be important drivers for organizations. I am not sure who exactly coined the term but security/identity management is definitely a "lifestyle" more than a product or release. The market and products continue to evolve to address top IT and consumer forces that are shaping security and business in 2010 and beyond. Here are just four of the key forces:

1. Cloud Computing
2. Social Media
3. Data Center Consolidation
4. Mobile Devices and Workforce

As a result, we had a very busy 2010 and made Identity Management an exciting segment of the IT market to work. Here are just a few of the events that shaped my world:

1. Oracle and Sun join forces in Identity Management, Feb. 2010. Oracle Directory Services Enterprise Edition and Oracle Identity Analytics are strategic projects.


2. Oracle Launches Security Newsletter with 22K initial readers, April 2010. The newsletter focuses on security news and products at Oracle.


3. Oracle Identity Management at Burton Catalyst 2010. This years show was fantastic but a little different as it was the first Burton Catalyst under Gartner. It contained great insight into the evolution of the industry and with the other tracts on Cloud, Collaboration and Data Center Management it had something for everyone. The show is scheduled to run in 2011 so we look forward to seeing it evolve.


4. Oracle Launches 11g for Identity Management, July 2010. The launch included new features for the entire identity management platform and specifically for the following products: Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Adaptive Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager.


5. Oracle Directory Services Enterprise Edition and Oracle OpenSSO complete new releases which include new branding.


6. Launched a new blog focused on Identity Governance called Identity Expressions
   


7. Launched a new product in the Identity Governance category called Security Governor. This product will help verticals like Healthcare take a holistic approach to security and identity.


8. Oracle Open World had over 25 sessions on Identity Management with over 200 people attending the Identity Management Keynote.


9. Oracle acquires Passlogix. After a very successful OEM relationship Oracle acquired Passlogix and continues to offer the Enterprise Single Sign-on Suite to it's customers.

2011 should be a great year and the start to a great new decade. I can predict one thing for sure. The Identity Management market will continue to evolve as new security challenges and new IT and consumer forces impact our solutions. Identities are key to any valuable transaction for business, consumers, partners, etc. Data is dumb when it is just data. When it is tied to an Identity it is much smarter and many, many times more valuable. Just ask Facebook, Google, etc. Identity Management is about putting people and business in control and if we make it easy for business and people to manage and implement then Identity Management will be critical to their success.