Aggressive Acquisition and Alignment with Sun's Identity System

Kudo's to Sun's FAM product engineering, acquisition team and partner integration team at Sun. I will highlight 9 recent developments that puts Sun's Identity System(Identity System includes FAM, IDM, RM, repository and more) in a different league;

• Open Source initiative - FAM as a product as you can see in the road map is a convergence of Open SSO, FM and AM. This implies support for MS Card-space, WS* -plus Liberty and SAML, along with extensibility of the Architecture with reusable services (such as Secure Token Service, Policy Service, etc).
• Sun Java System Role Manager a new acquisition that takes the notion of role management as a service - externalizing it from the applications and extending support for role mining, role mapping, RBACx and more (the functionality performed by Role Manager in conjunction with Identity Manager augments FAM)
• FAM 8.x is repository agnostic for user data stores and policy stores - i.e., user data can be in a Directory, RDBMS, FS, and more and policies can be distributed across many stores as well. Additionally both Identity Manager and Role Manager requires a RDBMS - this makes MySQL another option for our customers. Both Role Manager and Identity Manager are also integrated prior to the acquisition.
• Sun Directory Server with Directory Proxy (Virtual Directory) that can correlate identity and identifier from multiple directory repositories (including Active Directory) and replicates the relevant subsets of data into the network -including the edge, access, core, service and content networks. BTW: Both IDM, Dir and MySQL are all open source projects.
  
• Solaris 10 features such as RBAC, Trusted Extensions, and other Security features, are leveraged by the Identity System.
• Centralized management of FAM instances and policy agents is a big plus in FAM 8.x, Secure Attribute exchange, Secure Token Service, XACML support, are among the many new services that we are leveraging when integrating with 3rd party - policy engines and context/data engines
• Layer 7 is Sun's premier partner for SOA Security - WS-Policy integration, at the same time Bridgewater like company's solutions are leveraged for Network policies, and many more in the Policy space.
• Plus hundreds of ISV's that enhance the solution with bio-metric capability, 3factor authN (axsionics), digestAuthN for SIP, log management, reputation services, privilege management, reporting tools, augment the system with functionality needed for specific projects.
  
• Finally Neogent integrated into Sun Services, plus our SI partners and specialty delivery partners, ensure success of our projects.

Open, Scalable, multiple authN mechanism, integration into policies, extensible as services, pervasive from client to the network, support for Java and .NET, and more, along with integration with partner solutions puts this NG Identity System in a different league in 2008.