Announcing Oracle University training offerings for Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) Modernization

Oracle has been a key player in the enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) space for decades. Oracle’s IAM suite of products have been deployed by hundreds of customers to support their mission-critical and business-critical enterprise applications. The picture below shows the three key components of Oracle’s enterprise IAM Suite that have been traditionally deployed on premises. 

The main components of Oracle IAM Suite are – Oracle Directory Services (OUD), Oracle Access Management (OAM), and Oracle Identity Governance (OIG)

• Oracle Directory Services are a set of identity management products offered by Oracle that provide centralized management of user and application identities, authentication, and authorization. They provide a centralized repository for storing and managing user identities, credentials, and attributes. Oracle Unified Directory (OUD) is the directory service that provides high-performance, highly available, and secure storage for identities and access information.
• Oracle Access Manager (OAM) is a web access management solution that provides authentication and authorization for web-based applications. It enables organizations to secure their web applications and resources by enforcing access control policies that determine who can access what resources and under what conditions.
• Oracle Identity Governance (OIG) provides a centralized platform for identity governance and administration. The aim of OIG is to automate and streamline the process of managing identities, including the creation, modification, and removal of user accounts, and the assignment and revocation of access privileges.

As organizations embrace cloud technologies and construct hybrid multi-cloud architectures, they encounter both opportunities and challenges. The convergence of functional and non-functional business needs introduces complexity, while heightened security risks and stringent regulatory requirements demand robust solutions. Enterprises recognize that security is no longer an afterthought, and that it needs to be designed from the outset. Safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring compliance are paramount. As a result, security has risen to the top of the priority list.

In this dynamic landscape, businesses seek architecture options that seamlessly support the adoption of the newer technologies. Cloud adoption, containerization, and microservices architectures offer immense potential. Oracle, drawing from its extensive experience in Identity and Access Management (IAM), has crafted solutions that align with these trends.

Oracle’s approach encompasses technology and functional modernization, through modernization of existing technology portfolio and introduction of new cloud-native services that support customer business objectives. The picture below outlines this high-level approach.

This describes four paths to modernizing Identity and Access Management.

• Move and Improve: Also known as “Lift and Shift,” this approach enables technology modernization by moving your IAM workloads to the Cloud. In this approach, Oracle IAM software is migrated to OCI and deployed on cloud compute, enabling customers to take advantage of the Cloud benefits, including scalability and manageability. This also makes it easier to quickly integrate these security technologies with the enterprise applications running on OCI.
• Containerization: We realize that many of our customers have been containerizing their workloads driven by a number of benefits including portability, scalability, and efficiency. Oracle has adopted a DevOps delivery model by leveraging Containers for Docker and Kubernetes to modernize the lifecycle management of Oracle Identity and Access Management products. This approach will simplify the deployment and maintenance of Oracle IAM products across various deployments on physical, private cloud, or public cloud.
• IAM Microservices: Purpose-built microservices offer independent and focused functionality with the added benefits of scalability and resilience. Oracle’s IAM solution portfolio includes microservices such as Oracle Identity Role Intelligence (OIRI), Oracle Advanced Authentication (OAA), Oracle RADIUS Agent (ORA), and Oracle Adaptive Risk Management (OARM).
• Cloud-native SaaS: Last but not the least are the cloud-native IAM and IGA services that have been built from the ground up. These are modern, redesigned solutions that not only offer technology modernization but also functional modernization to address the challenges of today’s security landscape. They take advantage of the advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to provide more intelligent and intuitive solutions to the IAM and IGA problems.

Cloud-native IAM SaaS includes OCI IAM and Oracle Access Governance:

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides identity and access management features such as authentication, single sign-on (SSO), and identity lifecycle management.
• Oracle Access Governance is a cloud native Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution that provides insights-based access reviews, identity analytics, and intelligence capabilities for businesses.

The picture above shows the complete portfolio of Oracle IAM solutions, including the IAM software and Cloud-native SaaS. There are different journeys that customers take to get an ideal target architecture based on their current architecture, IAM and cloud maturity, and business drivers. We have developed training content to help our customers with these modernization journeys. I am happy to share the general availability of four courses related to Oracle IAM software and Oracle Access Governance cloud-native service in Oracle University. All these courses are available as part of the OCI Learning Subscription, which is currently available for free to our customers and partners. 

As customers modernize their Oracle IAM solution to address evolving threat landscapes and increased compliance requirements, they expect solution options and prescriptive guidance from Oracle. Their modernization journey could involve a combination of strategies that have been described before. We have released four Oracle University courses that are aligned with these modernization journeys. The summary of these courses is provided below.

• Journey 1: Deploying Oracle Identity and Access Management software as virtual machines (VMs) in OCI 
  • Learning Objectives:
    • Create necessary OCI artifacts like networks, security lists, and VMs, for an Oracle IAM installation in OCI
    • Perform installations of Oracle IAM Software on OCI resources
    • Migrate existing OnPrem deployments into OCI
    • Take advantage of the many maintenance and monitoring features to better manage the stack within OCI
  • https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/deploying-oracle-identity-and-access-management-in-oci/133671/
• Journey 2: Deploying Containerized Oracle Identity and Access Management on OCI 
  • Learning Objectives:
    • Use Oracle IAM container images to quickly spin up Oracle Identity Governance (OIG)
    • Run Oracle Access Management (OAM) and Oracle Unified Directory (OUD) 12c in Kubernetes environments
    • Use Oracle IAM containers to allow customers to move complex workloads to any public or private cloud vendor—significantly reducing operational cost and modernizing security infrastructure
    • Enable customers to smoothly continue their DevSecOps journey 
  • https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/deploying-containerized-oracle-identity-and-access-management-on-oci/133783/
• Journey 3: Deploying Oracle Identity and Access Management Microservices
  • Learning Objectives:
    • Learn the key features of Oracle IAM Microservices
    • Understand the architecture
    • Review the use cases for Oracle IAM microservices
    • Learn how to install and configure Oracle IAM
  • https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/microservices-for-oracle-identity-and-access-management/131697/
• Journey 4: Introduction to Oracle Access Governance 
  • Learning Objectives:
    • Basics of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)
    • Oracle Access Governance basics and architecture
    • Set up and configure Oracle Access Governance 
    • Concepts of Identity Orchestration
    • Integrate with authoritative and non-authoritative systems
    • Create access controls for ABAC, PBAC, and RBAC
    • Ensure governance and compliance with certification campaigns and access/policy reviews
    • Obtain identity intelligence using prescriptive analytics and insights
  • https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/introduction-to-oracle-access-governance/133528/

These courses also include hands-on demos to explain the concepts covered in the lessons. We hope that you enjoy these Oracle IAM Modernization journey courses and benefit from them.