A little over a year ago, I switched roles at Oracle and joined the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Product Management team working on Identity and Access Management (IAM) services. It's been an incredibly interesting (and challenging) year leading up to our release of OCI IAM identity domains.
We merged an enterprise-class Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution with our OCI-native IAM service to create a cloud platform IAM service unlike any other. We encountered numerous challenges along the way that would have been much easier if we allowed for customer interruption. But we had a key goal to not cause any interruptions or changes in functionality to our thousands of existing IDaaS customers. It's been immeasurably impressive to watch the development organization attack and conquer those challenges.
Now, with a few clicks from the OCI admin console, customers can create self-contained IDaaS instances to accommodate a variety of IAM use-cases. And this is just the beginning. The new, upgraded OCI IAM service serves as the foundation for what's to come. And I've never been more optimistic about Oracle's future in the IAM space.
Here's a short excerpt from our blog post Introducing OCI IAM Identity Domains:
"Over the past five years, Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) has grown to support thousands of customers and currently manages hundreds of millions of identities. Current IDCS customers enjoy a broad set of Identity and Access Management (IAM) features for authentication (federated, social, delegated, adaptive, multi-factor authentication (MFA)), access management, manual or automated identity lifecycle and entitlement management, and single sign-on (SSO) (federated, gateways, proxies, password vaulting).
In addition to serving IAM use cases for workforce and consumer access scenarios, IDCS has frequently been leveraged to enhance IAM capabilities for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) workloads. The OCI Identity and Access Management (OCI IAM) service, a native OCI service that provides the access control plane for Oracle Cloud resources (networking, compute, storage, analytics, etc.), has provided the IAM framework for OCI via authentication, access policies, and integrations with OCI security approaches such as compartments and tagging. OCI customers have adopted IDCS for its broader authentication options, identity lifecycle management capabilities, and to provide a seamless sign-on experience for end users that extends beyond the Oracle Cloud.
To better address Oracle customers’ IAM requirements and to simplify access management across Oracle Cloud, multi-cloud, Oracle enterprise applications, and third-party applications, Oracle has merged IDCS and OCI IAM into a single, unified cloud service that brings all of IDCS’ advanced identity and access management features natively into the OCI IAM service. To align with Oracle Cloud branding, the unified IAM service will leverage the OCI brand and will be offered as OCI IAM. Each instance of the OCI IAM service will be managed as identity domains in the OCI console."