Enterprises often utilize a multitude of digital platforms, applications, cloud services, and interconnected systems for business operations. So, enterprises frequently use disparate systems to manage and govern identities and access for the following reasons:

  • Unintegrated home-grown and legacy identity and access management (IAM) systems: Over time, enterprises accumulate various home-grown and legacy systems that may not integrate seamlessly with each other, posing challenges for centralized access management and governance.
  • Organizational silos: Different departments or business units within an organization often adopt IAM solutions tailored to their specific needs. As a result, centralized control becomes challenging.
  • Vendor specificity: Organizations choose IAM solutions from various vendors based on specific requirements or existing partnerships. Consequently, uniformity in IAM practices becomes elusive.
  • Mergers and acquisitions: During mergers or acquisitions, organizations inherit disparate IAM systems from the companies they absorb. This adds complexity to their IAM landscape.
  • Regulatory compliance: Compliance requirements continually evolve. Organizations respond by adopting more IAM solutions to address new regulations or standards. Unfortunately, this method often further complicates their IAM infrastructure.

This fragmented approach to IAM leads to a myriad of issues, such as inconsistencies in access, inefficient processes, excessive permissions, and outdated compliance practices. Despite these challenges, identity governance and administration (IGA) plays a critical role in any information security strategy by providing in-depth visibility into an enterprise’s identity landscape and security posture, preventing excessive permission provisioning, and enabling security owners to take immediate actions to help uphold security and compliance standards.

Oracle Abstract Image

Oracle IGA offerings

For over two decades, Oracle has stood as a frontrunner in the Identity sector providing industry-leading solutions. With an ongoing dedication to its IAM solution portfolio, Oracle continuously updates and improves its offerings to meet evolving customer needs. With the launch of Oracle Access Governance in July of 2022, the following solutions are available to cater to the requirements of customers who are either prepared to transition to a fully cloud native option or opt to stay on with the traditional on-premises delivered software:

  • Oracle Identity Governance Suite (OIG): An on-premises and container-based IGA solution in Oracle’s IAM portfolio. It serves as the primary IGA solution and includes components such as Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Identity Analytics.
  • Oracle Access Governance (OAG): A cloud native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) IGA solution. It offers a comprehensive set of features specifically tailored to meet the evolving governance and identity management needs of businesses.

 

Similarities between Oracle Identity Governance and Oracle Access Governance

Although being two completely separate offerings from Oracle for IGA, OIG and OAG share a few functional similarities, including the following examples:

  • Manage access rights and identities.
  • Provide integration across diverse applications, systems, platforms, and identity stores, including HR systems, directories, databases, and cloud applications.
  • Offer robust access control features, such as access request, role, attribute, and policy-based access control.
  • Provide automated provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts and accesses.
  • Run periodic and event-based access certifications.
  • Deliver advanced identity governance capabilities, such as risk-based access certification, policy enforcement, and identity analytics.
  • Improve security and compliance by ensuring proper access controls.

 

Differences between Oracle Identity Governance and Oracle Access Governance

OIG is a powerful enterprise identity management system that easily handles the most uncompromising and rigorous IT and business requirements. It’s designed to manage user access privileges across all of a firm’s resources throughout the entire identity management lifecycle, from initial creation of access privileges to dynamically adapting to changes in business requirements. Using a common identity governance framework, it ensures robust governance and compliance management.

OAG has several commonalities but distinguishes itself as more than just the SaaS counterpart of OIG. It offers IGA services with flexibility and scalability. Meticulously crafted with a contemporary architecture, it uses AI and machine learning (ML)-driven prescriptive analytics for access insights powered by peer-group analysis and outlier detection. This functionality enables security and business owners to adeptly navigate complex enterprise scenarios while maintaining an intuitive user experience.

 

 

Oracle Identity Governance

Oracle Access Governance

Product differentiators

  • Offers advanced customization and configuration options, making it well-suited for complex IAM environments

  • Customizable business workflows through Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

  • Predefined scheduled tasks ready to go

  • Password management

  • In-depth visibility into access by identities, organizations, identity collections, applications, permissions, roles, and cloud infrastructure

  • Fine-grained access control that is request-based, role-based, attribute-based and policy-based

  • Low-code access governance across infrastructure, applications, and services

  • Offers quick implementation and configuration options

  • Codeless business workflows and robust access controls

  • AI and ML-driven insights for identity access, policy reviews, and microcertifications

  • Agile methodology: Quick feature releases while maintaining quality

Reports and analytics
  • Custom reports through Oracle Analytics Publisher
  • Offers wide set of reports and intelligent analytics out-of-the-box

Deployment model
  • Oracle offers containerized virtual machine (VM)-based images for on-cloud deployment, secured behind the firewall
  • Cloud native SaaS
  • Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Autonomous Database

Implementation
  • Has a significant learning curve and requires trained personnel to manage and maintain the system
  • Intuitive user experience design allows business users to assume administrative capabilities easily

Maintenance and Updates
  • Customer-driven upgrades and patches, requiring regular updates
  • High maintenance cost
  • New features are made available on a regular basis
  • Low maintenance cost

Scalability
  • Flexible and customer-driven architecture for performance and scalability
  • Automated vertical and horizontal scalability and highly performant service

High-availability
  • Customer-driven, high-availability architecture as detailed in Oracle Enterprise Deployment Guide
  • High availability is part of all Oracle Cloud Service offerings, including Oracle Access Governance

 

Conclusion

Oracle Identity Governance and Oracle Access Governance are both robust IGA solutions. Organizations can select the most suitable solution based on their business requirements and preferences.

For more information, see the following resources: