If you have Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) in your oracle stack, you have the solution to a range of IAM challenges and the opportunity to drive innovation and growth.
As you persue your goals of driving digital transformation, creating customer-centric platforms and enabling the organisation to leverage its knowledge and resources, the issues of identity and access management (IAM) will no doubt be a recurring theme.
The IAM landscape for most organisations is already complex and, according to Ant Alan research vice-president at Gartner, it is only going to get worse. "The scope and scale of IAM is only going to increase" Alan told attendees at the Gartner IAM Summit 2015 in London. And, as is the case with many issues on the CIO agenda, security is a critical factor in the choice of an IAM strategy. In fact, IAM is, according to an IT spending priorities survey by Tech Target and Computer Weekly, the top security issue for UK and European businesses in 2015. The good news is however that thoughtfully implemented IAM strategies can deliver benefits beyond security and can enable business innovation and growth.
Enabling visibility and collaboration
Enabling the entire organisation to contribute to an innovative culture and to collaborate on the continuous improvement of the customer journey is no mean feat. The customer-centric, digital business processes that this demands are predicated on the existence of visibility and collaboration between divisions, systems and people. Creating this produces the constant need to integrate applications and to manage the way in which users access them.
This challenge is added to by the need to implement change as a rolling programme of development and integration - to implement the enterprise digital strategy wholesale simply being too costly and complex. In this scenario, you need and IAM strategy and tool set that:
- Supports incremental deployment
- Integrates modern and legacy systems
- Can scale in line with your goals i.e. SSO
There are, as always, a multitude of solutions for this available to you. For businesses already running the Oracle suite of middleware however, Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) offers you one very versatile solution.
Benefits of deploying OVD
OVD connects seamlessly with your multiple, existing identity repositories - both modern and legacy - and creates a unified view of each user identity within. It does this without moving the data from its original location, minimising the cost and disruption.
As the heart of a unified IAM solution, OVD protects application development and integration projects from the impact of changes to the identity landscape, further reducing costs and accelerating deployment.
In addition, OVD does away with the need to rip and replace existing solutions simply because they are decentralised or disconnected.
With OVD in place you will be able to rapidly move forward on projects that hinge on enterprise user access.
Supporting you journey toward Single sign on
A major advantage of OVD deployment is the flexibility it has to support your transformation priorities, even when they change. While you can start by connecting the data sources that matter to your priorities today, you can also be sure that the solution can scale to cope with the introduction of additional sources and identity pools later on.
The ability to integrate and unify multiple identity repositories, particularly LDAP servers, over time is vital to the achievement of any SSO objective. OVD can smooth the way.
Other potential applications
As mentioned earlier, in addition to unifying users' identities so that they can access essential business applications and systems, OVD can also expose certain data to systems that can help fuel a business's productivity and innovation.
One real-world example of this is our Expert Directory solution Invenio: People and Expertise Search Centre. Invenio is a knowledge management solution that goes beyond document sharing and allows your employees to find colleagues with the right skills, experience and expertise to facilitate project delivery or the achievement of business objectives.
Invenio can be deployed on a range of unified user directory solutions including OVD which, as you have read, can enable the solution at an attractive cost and with minimal disruption to services.
