Action Identity Blog

Working in multiple systems, applications, domains, and environments can be very frustrating and time consuming when controlling and maintaining growing businesses needs and requirements. Such things like passwords can be forgotten, lost, or even stolen more frequently in organizations that do not use any type of secure identity and access management solution. Also, provisioning users for authentication and authorization into various systems can sometimes take an entire team of resources days, weeks, or even months, depending on the size of the organization. This is why identity and access security are extremely important in almost every enterprise today. Many companies have already started to put into place different security solutions using software for two-factor authentication, and/or using identity and access management products like those offered by NetIQ, Oracle, CA, and ForgeRock.

Businesses need to be more flexible and adaptive towards the growing requirements and complex risks today. New mandates and policies required by the government like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Systems) are helping to prevent sensitive information from being obtained due to unsecure access. These types of agencies and acts create additional requirements and security policies put into place that many organizations must comply with. A good identity and access management solution gives organizations the ability to run real-time analytics of their business transactions and access detailed audit reporting features.  With advancements in workflow processing and consolidated security policies, identity and access management solutions can significantly improve the security of sensitive information while reducing business costs. 

Oracle provides a great tool built into Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) called Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA). OIA allows administrators to import data for identities, entitlements, reconciliations, and auditing from many systems. OIA boasts such administrator favorites such as role and entitlement approvals, access and privilege reconciliation, comprehensive role governance, and the ability to simulate role impact analysis based on specific data types specified. These types of features allow for better risk predictions, and in turn allow administrators to help to mitigate issues before they occur. Tools like the role impact simulator also help with reducing business disruptions when migrating users and applications.

Identity Management allows organizations to utilize tools from a centralized administration point and consolidate security policies, work with entitlement distribution, and provide the ability to automatically provision users. Valuable identity and access management products, like the ones offered by Oracle, are not only helpful with consolidating and automating tasks such as user provisioning and access management, but also assists with controlling every aspect of identity governance, increasing security requirements, and helping with increasing an organization’s overall efficiency.

Using the basic installation of an identity management or access management product can greatly improve the efficiency and security of an organization, as mentioned above, but utilizing additional components that can seamlessly integrate with the existing system can help with the continued effort of protecting valuable information. Oracle’s Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) is an excellent example of this, integrating with Oracle Access Manager. NetIQ offers NAGS (NetIQ/Novell Access Governance Suite) and NCMP, or the Novell Compliance Management Suite, which integrates with the NetIQ/Novell Identity Management Suite. Look forward to a breakdown of the components and features each of these products have to offer in my next article: The Pros and Cons of Adaptive Access Management. Thank you for your interest in this article. 

To learn more about identity management, please visit Action Identity. If you’d like to explore a SOX based identity and access management solution, we invite you to contact us. 

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