Talking Identity

Intrigued? The guys over in our Directory Services group (part of Oracle Identity Management) have just come out with a new offering which has a doozy of an acronym, even by Oracle standards. OAS4OS stands for Oracle Authentication Services for Operating Systems, software that greatly simplifies the authentication and account management process of Unix and Linux servers. It was available previously in preview mode, and that too only for Linux. This first generally available release adds support for all major flavors of Unix and Linux, including Oracle Enterprise Linux, RHEL, SLES, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and HPUX.

The OAS4OS offering integrates Oracle Internet Directory (OID) and Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) with a suite of tools and scripts to create a centralized identity and authentication store that slips in neatly into the PAM modules of these operating systems. As a result, you get:

• Centralized administration of user accounts across the entire Unix/Linux environment
  
• Single Sign-On across both enterprise applications and the Unix/Linux environment
• Powerful password policy capabilities
• Simplified management of the deployment
  

All resulting in better security and compliance. So say farewell to the (not so good) old days of local account management on the OS itself, and to insecure file-based mechanisms of provisioning accounts to NIS, all of which gave compliance officers headaches.

While it was possible to address this before using a similar approach, OAS4OS takes all the manual migration efforts, the guesswork and the expertise required in LDAP and PAM technologies to do this, and wraps it all up into a neat, easy to deploy package.

There are a number of helpful links in the press release, so check them out.