Patch Management of an Oracle Identity Management Deployment

Today I’d like to discuss a very important topic which is patch management in an Oracle IDM/IAM deployment.  Patching seems like a pretty basic topic.  It is often taken for granted.  However, experience has shown me that patching is a frequent source of confusion for many enterprise software customers including those deploying the Oracle Identity Management  stack.

So, I thought I’d address some common questions / topics related to patching so that people have a better understanding of what patches to apply to their environments and when to apply them. 

This post is a part of both the OAM 11g academy and OIM 11g academy series.

Identity and Access Management at Oracle Open World 2012

Oracle Open World 2012 is fast approaching. This year Open World will run September 30 – October 4th.

As usual, there will be lots of great Identity and Access Management events and activities to participate in.

There is a dynamically updated document entitled Focus On: Identity Management which highlights all the Identity Management related sessions, events, and activities.

That being said, there are three events that I’d like to highlight.

1) It almost goes without saying that the highlight of Open World (yes even more than Larry’s key note or all the cool concerts that they are throwing) will be the hands-on lab run by our very own Chris Johnson on Complete Access Management. The schedule says that Chris’s lab will be on Monday Oct 1, 1:45 @ Marriot Marquis. There are people who would give their right arms for a chance to interact in person with Chris on the latest trends and best practices in Access Management. So, do not miss out on this opportunity.

2) Amit Jasuja, Senior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security will be giving a session entitled Trends in Identity Management. This session focuses on how the latest release of Oracle Identity Management addresses emerging identity management requirements for mobile, social, and cloud computing and reduces TCO for organizations. Amit is a great guy, a great speaker, and a visionary in IDM and middleware security in general. So, I recommend that you definitely attend this event. Amit’s session will be on Monday Oct 1, 10:45AM @ Moscone West L3, Room 3003.

3) There is another hands-on lab led by Javed Beg on Integrated Identity Governance. The schedule says that this lab will be on Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 @ Marriot Marquis. These hands-on IDM labs should be some of the most instructive and informative events at OOW and Javed is a seasoned expert in the space. So, I encourage you to attend.

Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 Launch Webcast

The 11g R2 release of the Oracle Identity Management stack is upon us. The 11g R2 release greatly expands the capabilities of the stack, especially in the area of cloud and mobile environments. On Thursday, July 19 at 10am PST / 1pm EST there will be an interactive Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 launch webcast hosted by Oracle product development executives Hasan Rizvi and Amit Jasuja.


Register now for the interactive launch Webcast, and don’t miss this chance to have your questions answered by Oracle product experts.

Interview with a Security Architect

Oracle is hosting a very interesting web event that I thought I would point our readers to.

The event is an interview with Balganesh Krishnamurthy who is the lead Security Architect for Agilent's Identity and Access Management program.

Balganesh shares his thoughts on creating an Identity & Access Management roadmap and how to build a business case for Identity Management.

With over 15 years of experience leading Enterprise software deployments, Balganesh has seen it all. In this session, he discusses his roadmap and provides guidance on how other architects can learn from his experience.

One reason I think that this event could be good is that in my experience customers that see IAM as strategic and therefore develop clear roadmaps that map to business objectives do achieve better results than customers that adopt an ad-hoc strategy to IAM.

With that in mind, here are the event details:

Webcast: Best Practices: Getting Started with an Identity Platform

Date: Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Time: 10:00 AM PST

Register for the event here.

Who said IAM isn't funny

So, let's face it.  Us security/IAM guys are usually a fairly sober bunch.  Maybe we are even a little too serious at times, but that is what "they" pay us to be.  Still, it's good to be able to find humor in our work.  So, with that in mind, I thought I would share this excellent video produced by our crack Oracle IAM product marketing team:

http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=7319991&Act=331&pcode=WWMK11053701MPP023

Oracle Identity and Access Management patches are available NOW

flowers on my Kousa Dogwood tree

Each Spring I look forward to seeing my Kousa Dogwood tree bloom. The white flowers are beautiful in a way that pictures really can't convey and it's one of those things that cheers me up after the cold New England winter.

"Dogwood" also happens to be the code name for the Oracle Identity and Access Management product set and, like the flowers on my actual Dogwood tree, there's something pretty exciting happening to this Dogwood this spring.

Earlier today the press release went out announcing the availability second in a series of Dogwood releases. The first release, 11g R1 (version 11.1.1.3.0), came out in July 2010 and included the first 11g releases of Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. This release, known as 11g R1 PS1 (say that 3 times fast!) or as version 11.1.1.5.0 includes some pretty dramatic new features and functionality for the 11g R1 products and includes the first 11g release of Oracle Entitlements Server.

We all want to extend a well deserved congratulations to the product teams on a job well done. We haven't been able to speak publicly about the internal betas and release candidates, but now that we can we get to say that engineering did a really good job extending the reach of the existing products and in creating an initial 11g release of OES that fits well with the rest of the product set.

There are a whole bunch of products in the Identity Management suite and though their names are pretty obvious to us inside the company we know it can be confusing the first time you encounter them. So I thought it might be a good idea to try to provide a list of the products and to sum up each product's purpose in a single sentence.

The products in the Identity Management suite are currently broken into two separate release trains - the first is Identity Management and the second is Identity and Access Management.

The Identity Management (IdM) products are:

• Oracle Internet Directory - an enterprise-scale LDAP directory that stores its data in Oracle Database
• Oracle Virtual Directory - a Virtual Directory that aggregates data from multiple sources (LDAP, Active Directory, databases and custom stores) and exposes it all to clients as a single unified LDAP directory.
• Oracle Identity Federation - a federation server that supports SAML, Liberty ID FF, WS-Federation, OpenID and Infocard. 

The Identity and Access Management (IAM) products are:

• Oracle Access Manager - provides web Single Sign-On and access management
• Oracle Adaptive Access Manager - provides real time fraud detection and risk scoring plus web based strong authenticators
• Oracle Identity Manager - automates user and account management, provides self-service account tools and will automatically provision accounts to other systems, like LDAP and applications, based on workflow administrators define.
• Oracle Identity Navigator - a sort of portal providing a single place to go to access the consoles for all of the other IAM products.

The IAM products also include these new additions:

• Oracle Entitlements Server - allows you to remove the authorization decision logic from your code and instead manage fine grained authorization policies centrally.
• Oracle Secure Token Service - allows you to take one security token and exchange it for another to support identity propagation in your SOA architecture. For example you might present the STS with a Single Sign-On cookie and request a SAML Assertion in exchange.

You can find more information about all of these products from the Identity Management products page at Oracle.com.

You can expect more posts on the new features over the coming month or so as we finally get to play with and talk about the final release.

Once again congratulations to the product teams!