Wednesday, August 24, 2011

What's new in Oracle Access Management

Yesterday, as part of the IOUG education series, I did a webinar about layering enterprise security with Oracle Access Management components. We also spent some time explaining what's new in Oracle Access Management 11gR1 PS1 (11.1.1.5.0), released earlier this summer.

The replay will be available shortly, so check back soon.

We focused on a number of key themes for the PS1 release, including:
  • Single Platform to Secure Access to Data, Applications and WebServices
  • Centralized Session Management to deliver stronger security
  • Stronger methods of Authentication including OTP tokens, and KBA
  • Enhanced Manageability
    • Centralized Server and Agent Administration
    • Inline Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
One of the other cool things we did in this release was complementing the existing OAM services - authentication, SSO, and session management - with a new, integrated standards-based security token service.

This is a great example of how we layer functional products, like Oracle Access Manager and Oracle STS, on top of our modular, shared services architecture. We also centralized policy management and administration of the two products into a single console:






 


This integrated approach allows customer to deploy OAM and STS together, or to disable services that aren't required. For example customers that have already deployed a 3rd party authentication and SSO system and don't require OAM services can deploy Oracle STS with that 3rd party system.

In case it isn't obvious, deployment flexibility is another theme of the release.

We are pretty excited about some of the new features and will be posting on individual products in the release, including Oracle Access Manager, Oracle ESSO, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager in upcoming blog posts.