Comment by skissane
10 days ago
OAM and OIM aren’t “LDAP/directory products” per se.
OAM is an access management product, used to implement stuff like SSO (single sign-on). So, for example, it comes with a module you can install in Apache which will intercept HTTP requests and redirect them to OAM’s login page - which may potentially talk to an LDAP to authenticate you. Or you can do stuff like define some URL patterns in an app as sensitive so they require a more secure authentication mechanism (such as 2FA or smart card), other URL patterns as less sensitive so password-only login is sufficient
OIM is basically about provisioning accounts from a source system into target systems. Those systems could be LDAPs from various vendors, but can also be HR systems (Oracle’s various offerings and SAP too), IBM mainframes (RACF, TopSecret, ACF2), Unix/Linux hosts, database tables, custom apps… also lets you do things like setup workflows to approve system access requests, you can configure it to require reapproval of high risk access requests by management every X months or else they get revoked (used for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance), etc
Source: I used to work for Oracle Engineering, in a team which handled escalations for these products-especially OIM, but I stuck my fingers in most of them. When I left (back in 2017, so a while ago now) they were putting a lot of effort into their cloud offering (IDCS, more recently replaced by OCI IAM), but I’m sure the on-premise offerings are going to stick around for a long time, especially because they have some customers (e.g. in the national security space) for which cloud is unlikely to be a viable solution any time soon
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