Changing the Face of Identity Management

By Michelle Savage

July 21, 2008 —  (Page 3 of 4)
Indeed, a number of summer announcements highlighted the commitment to putting identity management in the hands of end users—giving them the tools they need to manage identities and access information—and delivering a single solution for identity management.

Sun Microsystems added business roles to its provisioning software package, in an effort to keep up with the ever-growing list of competitors, including CA and Oracle, who allow users to define business roles in their identity management solutions. Sun Identity Manager 8.0 is available as a standalone solution or as part of the Sun Java Identity Management Suite, which allows users to manage identities, including validating role definitions; compare user access privileges to assigned exceptions; and log user access. Sun said that its overall identity management strategy involves further unification of this suite, to expand beyond identity, roles, and compliance to access and directory.

Shortly after announcing a reseller deal with Eurekify, a provider of software for role-based management in large enterprises, CA extended its Identity Lifecycle Management solution, which is made up of CA Identity Manager for provisioning and CA Security Compliance Manager for entitlement certification and role management technology, to include Identity Manager r12, which adds strong auditing and reporting capabilities that enable customers to more easily respond to the compliance mandates of  “Who has access to what?”

And Microsoft took a second stab at identity and access management with the public beta release of Identity Lifecycle Manager 2, which Leland said puts users at the center of the application suite. “This is the first integrated identity management system that gives identity management tools to audiences beyond the IT department, including powerful self-service capabilities through Microsoft Office for end users and familiar .NET- and WS-*-based tools for developers,” he added.

According to Leland, Microsoft’s overall strategy is to deliver a full range of identity management solutions that supports both on-premises scenarios as well as cloud-based scenarios, and both physical and virtual environments.

ILM 2 is a step in this direction; it supports identity and access management across both physical and virtual environments and can be extended across operating system environments by Microsoft partners. For example, Gemalto offers two-factor authentication, Omada Solutions provides role-based access control and compliance, and Quest Software extends Active Directory and Active Directory federation to non-Windows environments.

Related Search Term(s): Identity management, CA, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun

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