Identity as a Service - IDEAS about IDaaS

A Leak ? You call what’s happening here “a Leak”? The last time we had a leak like this, Noah built himself a boat

Information sharing becomes extremely complex once you need to secure information outside and across enterprise boundaries, such as information for business customers, prospects, partners, dealers, or other “outsiders.”

The current IT practice of concentrating all security at the network perimeter has created an enterprise environment that looks like a single hard shell around a soft chewy center (Think Tootsie Pop); However, a cohesive identity management strategy across the enterprise lets an enterprise securely facilitate these exchanges without placing undue strain on often over-burdened internal resources. This makes it easier to develop and expand alliances and channels, expand and accelerate business opportunities, at the same time reducing IT cost and complexity – thereby reducing leaks, leaks of information and productivity.

Identity Management helps organizations deal with many of the issues and challenges they face as they attempt to respond to information sharing, increased security threats, wide-ranging compliance initiatives and rising IT bottlenecks. Moreover, Identity Management defends an organization not only from external threats but also more importantly from internal threats – often the source of the majority of security risks.

The “big idea” here is to bring security closer to the data and the services it is trying to protect. At the EBS Group, we think of Identity as a Service which externalizes Identity into a service layer in the Enterprise Architecture..

It makes identity a key security artifact on which to base security decisions wherever they need to be made, making it possible to build security at the appropriate perimeter; be that the Network perimeter, at the application perimeter, or even at the data store perimeter. At the same time, it provides centralized management of security policies and scalable management of the massively distributed identity data so that corporate networks can be safely opened up to customers, suppliers, and partners.

Information sharing creates many opportunities for enterprises, but also many challenges and dangers. IT growth must contend with the legions of information and security threats that cast a shadow over your best-laid business plans. Oracle has developed and refined state-of-the-art information security for customers worldwide. The EBS Group can help your organization deploy best practices to protect against security threats while maintaining the agility and functionality of your IT infrastructure.

The Parable of “the Information Age”

To quote Charles Dicken’s from the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. As the amount of available information (physical and digital) continues to grow and thereby create knowledge and opportunity…the very real challenge of taking advantage of all this information, grows as well. As we’ve moved squarely into the information age (dare I say digital age), organizations large and small have faced several new challenges with the creation, distribution, consumption and management of content – both paper-based as well as digital. Fortunately, the capabilities and the technology of enterprise content management (ECM) have evolved dramatically over the past few years and are now moving beyond the easy knee-jerk reaction of “buying a bigger SAN”.

Historically, content management applications were used to address separate lines of business (LOBs) like Finance, Legal & Compliance, Human Resources, Sales, IT infrastructure and Web needs – all of which have specific functional needs but also basically perform very similar functions. These previously disparate systems are converging and now capable of addressing the needs of the entire organization – on one platform. This eliminates or at least greatly reduces integrations and cost redundancies while at the same time provides a solid infrastructure ( or Content Service) that promises to minimize or eliminate the costs of separate systems, support, development and integrations, improve user experience and productivity, and simplify upgrades, maintenance and training. This new “Unified” approach returns a tremendous return on investment (ROI) and in a much shorter time than the current “Band-Aid” or “Patchwork” solutions.

Unified ECM provides the full array of ECM functionality – including document and imaging management, records and retention management, Web content management, and digital asset and information rights management all on one platform - by leveraging a common set of content services that are shared across independent content management applications…and that will provide rapid ROI to most organizations.

Put us to the test: We’ve created a ROI Calculator and Assessment engagement that I guarantee is worth the time and effort to try. We’ve also partnered with Oracle/Stellent on this so that the cost of the Assessment will be credited back to your Organization if you ultimately choose Oracle as your platform for Unified ECM.