Tag Archive for: Identity Management

Using Tivoli Federated Identity Manager to Get What You Want

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  1. You want to enhance your company’s business-to-business and business-to-consumer collaborations with centralized user access management through application integration and secure authentication.
  2. You want to improve the experience of users at your company and lower costs through business-to-consumer user self-care and federated access control to on and off premises applications.
  3. You want to enable single sign-on (SSO) for external users to internal applications and for internal users to cloud-based applications.
  4. You want to provide web fraud detection and prevention capabilities through risk-based access control.

You want a lot!!!!!    Lucky for you there is …………

Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (TFIM)

IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager is an access-management solution that provides web and federated SSO to end users across multiple applications.  TFIM allows collaboration across an organization’s business ecosystem and plays a key role in businesses extending their application access to business partners, customers and consumers. TFIM provides the ability for internal users to access externally hosted applications, including cloud-based applications and business partner applications. Read more

Identity and Access Management Best Practices Webinar

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How Levi leveraged Identity Management infrastructure to enable “just in time” fully automated privileged system access

Presented by:

  • Chuck Lankford, Global Director of Security at Levi Strauss & Co.
  • Chris Fields, Vice President of Security Strategy, PathMaker Group
  • Ravi Srinivasan, Director of IBM Security, Strategy, and Product Management

In our 50 minute webinar you will:

  • Learn about the latest market trends in Identity and Access Management
  • See why the IBM IAM Suite is one of the hottest sellers in the last six months
  • See what’s new with the IBM IAM Suite including upcoming features and capabilities
  • Hear what customers are buying and why
  • Learn the five most common benefits from a robust IAM infrastructure
  • Learn about best practices for implementing provisioning, access management, federation
  • Hear customer use cases and their key business drivers for IAM

Chuck_Lankford

About the key presenter, Chuck Lankford:

Chuck is the Director of Global Information Security for Levi Strauss & Co. and has responsibility for protecting LS&Co. from threats to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of LS&CO systems, information and infrastructure. Chuck has been with LS&Co. more than 10 years has served in global IT leadership roles for 17 years. Prior to joining LS&Co. Chuck was Director of Global Networking for network products manufacturer 3Com (Santa Clara, CA) where he architected and managed 3Com’s global voice, data and video networks. Chuck holds numerous certifications including Certified Information Security Systems Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker, Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and Certified Information Systems Risk Consultant (CISRC).test

Chris_Fields

About Chris Fields:

Chris has held his CISSP certification since 2003 and is the Identity Management Architect & Visionary responsible for setting the strategic direction and architecture approach for all of our IBM identity and access management projects. He is also responsible for managing partner relationships with identity management vendors. Chris’ love of technology makes everything about his job enjoyable. Mentoring and expanding the technical skill sets of his employees is the most enjoyable aspect of his daily activities. Equally enjoyable is the time spent helping clients to understand the industry and discuss viable options for them to begin and mature their identity and access management infrastructures.

Ravi_SrinivasanAbout Ravi Srinivasan:

Ravi manages the IBM identity, access and mainframe security portfolio strategy and product management based in Austin, Texas. He has over 15 years of experience in product management, market strategy, and development in software and services industries. Ravi meets and consults with senior management, lines of business owners and IT operations management around the world on their key security, risk, and compliance initiatives. He’s also a frequent speaker at trade, analyst conferences and customer events to share a worldwide customer perspective and insights on secure mobile, cloud and social business transformations. Ravi mentors several security services practitioners and product managers to develop practical solution approach to changing security, risk and compliance needs.

7th Stage (Security) of IS growth, Part II

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A little background:

Now that you’ve been in the CIO’s position for your first quarter, it is time to prepare for your first review with the board of directors.  The agenda for the IS presentation will cover key factors that you discovered in your operations, your accomplishments and your plans for the next year.  Since this is the quarter for your next year’s budget, it should contain the funding needed to accomplish the IS plan.

One of the key factors in the review of your operations was discovering the lack of security focus and non-compliance issues that made the operations vulnerable to unwanted intrusion in your network.  Listed in your accomplishments is the Security Assessment study and recommendations provided by PathMaker Group when you engaged them for a study of your IS environment.  One of their recommendations was to deploy IBM’s Security products for managing Identify and Application Access in your enterprise network.  This is an important undertaking as your company will replace the outdated security monitoring with IBM’s Showcase Solution to keep unwanted intruders out while making it easier for the authorized users to have easy access to their applications.  As a result of PathMaker Group’s findings and recommendations, you asked them to submit a proposal for the corrective solution using IBM Security Products and PMG Professional Services to deploy them in your IS Network.

This section of your review was very well received by the board of directors and they gave you the approval to get started.

Read more

OIM User Attributes Modification

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While integrating Oracle Identity Manager within a corporate environment, sometimes it is important to change some user attributes externally. OIM API provides simple means to perform these operations.

As is the case in any operation, a connection needs to be made to the OIM instance. This is a simple task, but one must ensure that credentials are properly stored and protected.

 

protected static OIMClient client;

private static String OIMInitialContextFactory = “weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory”;

 

public OIMConnect(String fileName) throws Exception

{

Hashtable<String, String> env = new Hashtable<String, String>();

env.put(OIMClient.JAVA_NAMING_FACTORY_INITIAL, OIMInitialContextFactory);

env.put(OIMClient.JAVA_NAMING_PROVIDER_URL, CONNECTION_URL);

client = new OIMClient(env);

System.setProperty(“java.security.auth.login.config”, AUTHCONF_FILE);

System.setProperty(“OIM.AppServerType”, “weblogic”);

client.login(OIMUSERNAME, OIMUSERPASSWORD.toCharArray());

return;

}

Read more

Tivoli Directory Integrator – Before Initialize – Add Date to File Name

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I wrote a different TDI blog discussing the Before Initialize Hook.  That blog discussed setting the filter in an Iterator.  Here is another use for the Before Initialize Hook, this time in a File System Connector.  As I mentioned in prior PathMaker Group blogs Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) is a pretty neat tool that comes packaged with IBM Tivoli Identity Manager (ITIM) with a bunch of Connectors. This blog will relate to the File System Connector.

Have you ever wanted to build create a File System Connector that creates a file that has a unique value so the process can run multiple times a day or week and you don’t have to worry about overlaying the file?  This can be accomplished with the Before Initialize.  In this case the process will only run once a day so only the date is added to the end of the file name. Read more

TDI Null Entries

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Tivoli Directory Integrator is a powerful tool that we often use as part of an ITIM migration or rollout. What makes it great is its unique ability to translate data from one source of almost any type into another. It really doesn’t matter if you’re using something as a primitive XLS maintained manually by HR or a complex set of relational databases. TDI can get the data, do any number of out of the box or even custom translations that are necessary to get your data into the form you want it.

Through this data “smoothing” process there will inevitably be some odd-ball data that you find. Whether it is a random string value when you expected a Boolean true/false or a legacy attribute that’s only assigned to 25% of the objects you’re migrating.

And then there’s the “null” entry, which will come up often as well. Null values are pesky because we don’t always know why they’re there, sometimes it’s important that the attribute is moved over whether there is a value assigned or not. Other times we want to clean up our data while we’re moving it, and pull out all any attributes assigned with no value. Luckily for us, TDI has a feature built in to assist with this. Read more

Knock Knock. Who’s there? Ivanna. Ivanna who? Ivanna steal your data!

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I recently read a story about a vulnerability that was discovered in electronic door looks commonly used in hotels.  The problem centers around a particular popular model of hotel door lock sold to hotels globally. Hackers claim to have discovered that the company left a security port uncovered that allows them to open any of the locks with a universal key of sorts.  The article goes on to say that until this flaw has been fixed it’s more important than ever to make sure to go the extra step of securing your door with the deadbolt and chain.

A lot of people will trust that the basic security of their software/operating system/network (the electronic door lock) is good enough.  They won’t bother adding additional security (the deadbolt/chain) and will end up getting their data hacked in the same way that some hotel guests are going to wake up to find their room cleaned of valuables way better than the maid removes dust and dirt.

Thieves are counting on people to trust standard security and not do their own due diligence to identify vulnerabilities or provide additional security to deal with these deficiencies.  While the average person has no way to determine if the hotel door lock is secure, they can at least provide another layer of security to prevent a breach and loss of property.

Fortunately for you, Pathmaker Group can review your security system and find vulnerabilities and patch them up before data thieves strike.   They can also provide additional layers of identity and access management to secure application access and prevent unauthorized access, even from those already on the inside.  So don’t delay, you never know who’s knocking on the door…

7 Minutes of Terror

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Last month we witnessed an amazing feat of science & engineering with the landing of NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars. Before this could be accomplished years of preparation through innovation, design & testing had to occur. It all culminated towards what the NASA scientists and engineers at JPL call “the 7 minutes of terror” – the 7 minutes between when Curiosity entered the Mars atmosphere and when it was expected to land. Of course we know now that it was a fantastic success – but what made it so? How does an organization accomplish such a fantastic undertaking?

Well it got us here at PMG thinking; what is it that we do together with our clients that makes projects a success? We know we’re not rocket scientists, but it’s still fun to day dream & draw some interesting connections between the Curiosity mission and our own business and philosophies.  Read more

ITIM Provisioning Policy Priority

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A provisioning policy in ITIM (IBM Tivoli Identity Manager) basically grants access and set entitlements to the ITIM managed services based on the provisioning policy membership.

Each provisioning policy consists of information and settings on the following tabs:

  • General
  • Members
  • Entitlements

Of course, there are factors to consider: Role Memberships, service selection policies and policy join behaviors to name a few but this blog is just looking at the value of the required priority attribute.

The priority setting is a required value on the General tab of the provisioning policy configuration.  This is a required numeric attribute and the lower the number the higher the priority of the Provisioning Policy. Read more