Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite continues to a be a leader for on-premise access management and governance and released (somewhat quietly) a new version last year called 12c. From what I’ve heard, many organizations on older versions are wondering why they should upgrade to the latest release.

In this post, I’ll highlight three advantages gained by upgrading.

1) Ongoing support

The most important reason to upgrade to the latest release of the Identity and Access Management suite is to eliminate any concerns about support; this goes for any product, but is particularly important here since you’ll continue to receive patches for bugs and other weaknesses as they are discovered.

Considering that over 50% of all data breaches occur because of unpatched software, you do not want to have a critical component of your organization’s security system in a state where it cannot be patched because it’s out of support. By deploying the latest version of the product suite, you know without a doubt that you can get support when you need it.

2) Simplified architecture leads to robust deployments

Oracle has provided improvements in their system architecture like using the Oracle database (instead of Coherence) to manage Oracle Access Manager (OAM) session caches. This architecture is simplified and enables easier maintenance.

3) Key new features

With Oracle’s new 12c security stack, there are several new key features worth mentioning that have us most excited.

• OAM Password Policy: Enables multiple password policies with just OAM; no longer has a dependency on Oracle Identity Manager making this product faster and easier to deploy and manage; there is no need for the complete OIM product.

• Oracle Identity Manager (OIM): Simplified compliance by allowing for a custom access certification reviewer.

• Oracle Unified Directory (OUD): Now supports Oracle Database TNS Names. TNS Names are like DNS for Oracle databases. This simplifies application connectivity to Oracle databases in large deployments.  In the past, many organizations didn’t deploy OUD because they found Oracle Internet Directory (OID) too complicated to manage. Now you can take advantage of the simplicity and speed of OUD without the overhead of OID.

The skinny

Some of these same reasons for upgrading are true for any software product you own. You really can’t afford the risk of running outdated software. Fortunately, with the new OAM, some of the new features have great potential to make your environments easier to maintain.

We’d love to hear from you and start on your custom IAM solution today. There are several different ways to get in touch with us, so pick your favorite and let’s start solving problems today.