By Charles F Moreira
While today’s increasingly mobile employees remotely access company information systems on portable devices any time from anywhere, which greatly improves productivity and competitiveness, it also exposes enterprise information systems to greater identification challenges which their information services (IS) departments must be able to adequately cope with.
Industry analyst Ovum said that the trend for employees to use their personal devices such as smartphones and tablets for work has become mainstream, with 70% of employees accessing corporate information on their smartphones and 80% of their activities not being adequately managed by IS departments.
“Already, 62% of companies use public social networking services to interact with their customers and by 2014, 90% of companies will provide their staff and customers with mobile applications,” said Kenneth Hee, Oracle’s business development director for Enterprise Security, Asia Pacific.
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| Kenneth Hee, Oracle |
“Also based upon our Asia Pacific customers’ feedback, an increasing number of employees in the region are working on their own portable devices from home and elsewhere, instead of staying longer in the office as they did before. With the horrendous traffic jams in countries such as China and India, senior executives are turning to mobile devices to make approvals and view sensitive corporate information, instead of having to travel into offices for two hours to do so,” Hee added.
So more and more organisations in the region are developing enterprise mobile applications which run on smartphones and tablets, including in China, India, South Korea and Thailand and they also need to ensure security when they are used to access company information; as result some are looking towards Oracle’s Identity Management solution to help them.
Identity – the new frontier
“Identity is the new parameter to enable access,” said Hee, who was in Kuala Lumpur on 6 November to present the new, centralised, enterprise back end Oracle Identity Management 11g Release 2 (11gR2) platform. 11gR2 was launched worldwide on 19 July and Oracle has been on a roadshow which has wound through 14 cities across the region since then.
11g Release 2 comes three years after Release 1 and many of its new features extend Oracle’s expertise in security and identity management to mobile applications, social network identities, and cloud applications.
It consolidates Oracle’s Identity Management offerings into three main areas – i.e. Identity Governance, Access Management and Directory Services.
Identity Governance handles access requests, provisioning and certification with a simple common user experience, coupled with extensive analytics to meet an organisation’s compliance, governance and security needs.
New features include Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM), a business friendly, self service shopping cart style user interface that lets employees request access to applications, simple in the browser customisation, new cloud application provisioning support; and enhanced compliance reporting with multi-level certification.
While OPAM can operate as a stand-alone application, its real value comes from its integration with other identity management components, such as self service password request user interface and automated workflow approvals via Oracle Identity Manager, and detailed historical reporting via Oracle’s business intelligence tools.
Access Management enables end-to-end user authentication and authorisation protection across an organisation’s data, applications, and web services.
New features include native mobile security and single sign on, support for social sign-on (to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn), and REST API for custom and mobile application development, support for multiple identity stores and multi-datacentre configurations, enhanced third party integrations and enhanced fraud detection.
Directory Services provides a comprehensive, directory service option. New features include proximity based search and virtual attributes enable frequent updates to the directory made by location based services to support mobile and social applications; an optimised solution for Oracle Unified Directory, featuring carrier-grade scalability and reliability that enables high performance for cloud, mobile and social ecosystems.
It also provides all-in-one capabilities that unify storage, proxy, synchronisation and virtualisation, allowing flexibility for enterprise and large scale deployments with a smaller footprint that simplifies management and installation while helping ensure interoperability with a wide range of hardware and operating systems.
Big improvements have also been made to the self-service access request user interface to make it more business user friendly, including plain English search to request application access and roles, and shopping cart style check-out.
Automated confirmations and workflows allow business users to get updates and check the status of their requests. In addition, extensive customisation lets companies to completely control the look and feel of these pages.
Secured
11gR2 currently secures customers’ own applications developed for the Apple iPhone and iPad as well as Android devices, with its client component integrated into the device application, while the identity management is done at the back end.
It can be configured to comply with corporate access policies, such as limiting to corporate information when it detects that the users is outside pre-designated, full-access areas based upon GPS or base station triangulation location information or the IP addresses of WiFi hotspots.
In such cases, it can be configured to allow full access with additional layers of identification, such as requiring users to provide additional self pre-configured authentication details such as mother’s maiden name, answers to selected questions, an additional factor of authentication such as a code sent to their mobile phones, email address and so on.
The Oracle entitlement server monitors unusual patterns of user behaviour, such as attempts to log in from another country, multiple funds transfers just below the maximum limit, unusually large transactions and so on.
Also, unlike regular user ID and password authentication which can eventually be cracked or logged by a determined hacker, 11gR2’s dynamic challenge and response interactions are less predictable and more difficult for hackers to anticipate and exploit.
Oracle is also looking into making 11g available for Windows Phone devices as well.
11gR2 manages identity when accessed using a Web browser on Windows, MacOS, Solaris and AIX computers connected to corporate information systems over a virtual private network (VPN).
Oracle’s existing 11g customers in Malaysia, including Release 1 customers, comprise of telecommunication service providers, banks, government departments, manufacturers and retailers, with large number of internal and external users. For example, banks use it to manage access by their e-banking customers.
While large organisations would usually implement 11gR2 as part of their back-end systems, it’s also available with Oracle Cloud as software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) and later, infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
Oracle Identity Management also comes with Oracle’s PeopleSoft business and industry solutions, Oracle’s Siebel customer relationship management solution and Oracle E-Business Suite.
