Ben Goodman, in an Intelligent Workload Management article, notes that there's a coming paradigm shift in the world of compliance. He talks specifically about the new trend of turning to identity management solutions for help with compliance. We heard more about this trend from Dave Kearns in his discussion on SailPoint expanding its Access Governance solutions into the Identity Management space and Courion doing the inverse.

I spoke to an analyst recently who was hoping to see additional convergence between identity management, access governance, and compliance solutions. I think we can probably all agree that it would be nice. In my opinion, we're at least a few years out from that. Not because of technology, but because we need customer demand to drive it. And this is all so confusing, I don't think many organizations have come the Buddha-like realization of what an ideal identity and access state would look like for them.

Mr. Goodman can correct me, but I boil his point down to one easy statement: Start with Security and compliance will follow.

Bsafe Information Systems recently announced the availability of a major new release of its security suite for i/OS. With Bsafe/Enterprise Security version 6.1, the company is now offering a new Identity Management module that gives administrators more powerful and finer grained control over access to System i resources. The new version also includes new multi-system capabilities, as well as a redesigned Report Generator that makes it easier to create custom security and audit reports.

The new identity management module that debuts with Bsafe/ES version 6.1 may be the most significant new security feature out of Bsafe in years. The software, which is technically part of the Central Management System module, allows administrators to control who has access to what System i resources by using the concept of user roles, which is not a concept that's native to i/OS (but which is increasingly how administrators prefer to view their users).

Imagine pointing your mobile device/smart phone at a co-worker and seeing a holographic depiction of all the system access assigned to that person. Sound far-fetched? It may be a reality sooner than you think.

Although still experimental, the technology is available. Using face recognition technology to match the person's face with a picture stored on the server, any stored information tied to that profile picture can be sent back and displayed to the requestor.
Imagine an environment where authorized people could perform spot Access Certification checks by simply pointing a mobile device equipped with a camera at a co-worker's face. System access is looked up and displayed in a meaningful way as a holographic image/text floating around that person's face. Think of the possibilities and enterprise use cases this immediate access to information could serve. Read more about this technical capability here: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24639/?nlid=2766&a=f

Ping Identity, the leader in Internet Identity Security, will share real-world examples of effective identity management in the Cloud at SaaS/Gov 2010, April 5, 2010, in Washington, DC. Ping Identity security and federated identity management experts will be on hand to share real customer use cases, product demos and insights into how new technologies and third-party services are meeting critical requirements around Single Sign-On in the Cloud.

With Software-as-a-Service achieving widespread market penetration, government organizations have shifted from determining whether or not they should adopt SaaS services to determining how to adopt them effectively. SaaS/Gov 2010 brings independent software vendors, systems integrators and federal IT purchasers together to explore the impacts and opportunities of SaaS and cloud computing in the government sector.

Oracle Access Manager 10gR3 (10.1.4.3) is now certified for use with E-Business Suite Releases 11.5.10 and 12.1, using the new component, Oracle E-Business Suite AccessGate.

Previously, E-Business Suite only supported single sign-on capabilities through Oracle Single Sign-On Server. While it was possible to integrate with Oracle Access Manager, this still required Oracle Single Sign-On Server as an intermediary, and did not allow access to the full feature set of Oracle Access Manager.

With the release of Oracle E-Business Suite AccessGate, this is no longer the case. E-Business Suite AccessGate is a Java EE application that resides on a separate application server, and provides direct integration between E-Business Suite and Oracle Access Manager. This direct integration also opens the door to the full set of authentication features in Oracle Access Manager, as well as integration with other products in Oracle's portfolio, such as Oracle Identity Federation or Oracle Adaptive Access Manager.