Oracle Access Manager Reviews

The product is our solution for SSO (Secure Sign On). The solution allows users to sign in to one application, for example, Windows, and they will have access to other applications that require login without having to log in each time.

It decreases the complexity of access. This alone saves time, confusion and trouble.

SSO itself is valuable because it allows the users just to have one password. After logging in to their machine, users don't need to remember or enter additional passwords. There is no need to log in and log out many times, which saves time. Users log in to any application just by typing the initial password.

The product could be improved by simplifying changing the master password. That is, if you change a password in one place it would be good to automate changing the password for all the gateways so that change is less complicated.

It is very stable. This is because it is a mature product and it gets better with time. It improves and I think that it continues to do so.

It is very scalable. You can serve as many users as you need to add. As long as you have the machines and infrastructure in place there are no real limits to the scalability.

Initially, the customer support was in Europe and the technicians were very knowledgeable. Now they have changed support locations and customer support is not as good. The technicians are simply not as knowledgeable and experienced with the solution. Hopefully, over time this will work out and the new technicians will gain the knowledge that they need to service customers better.

In my experience, clients did not have a previous solution. The idea of the installation was to provide a solution which did not previously exist and make managing sign on less complicated.

In most cases the implementation is simple. However, it can get more complicated. In an instance which requires high security (e.g., a bank), we have to make sure there are no back door entry points to log in. Once this is done, it is very secure. If the installation is simple, it doesn't take much time. If there are hundreds of machines and they require customization, it can take quite a bit of additional time.

It's not easy to integrate Oracle Access with other non-Oracle products. It takes some more effort, and you will need to refer to the documentation or technical support. It will allow integration, but it will not necessarily be easy to implement.

We do the implementations ourselves so there is no need for additional vendors or engineers.

It is difficult to really tell what the exact return on investment is. The product saves time and increases security. These are the benefits.

Pricing is scalable depending on the number of users. The more users, the more it will cost. It is not the cheapest solution but it is the most compatible with Oracle.

We have chosen to install this product as an SSO solution because it is powerful, recognized and mature. We really did not consider other solutions as we service Oracle installations.

Oracle Access Manager is a very efficient solution if you're working with Oracle applications like ELT, and so on. It's very efficient with this because integration is built-in. You have to make sure that an application is supported by Oracle as the Access Manager product is meant to supporting their own products.

I will rate it as an eight out of ten because it's a good solution, it's very stable and integrated with Oracle solutions. It can be scaled as much as you need as long as you can afford it. 

Single sign on between analytics and financial platform for internal and external users.  Authorization was front-door only, no granularity between apps.  Used to force acknowledgement of terms of use.

I was able to use the new SAML Service Provider capability to consume a federated token and exchange it for an OAM token for subsequent session requests across multiple applications.

Pretty robust dynamic HTTP Header Responses
Stateful session management, enabling server-side session termination and/or prevention of concurrent logins.

The ADF UI is clunky, IMO
The session URL redirects have to be accounted for network-wise. Default is client talking to OAM Server (PDP) in middle tier, which is not realistic. Need separate load balancer/VIP just for this.
Identity propagation to backend apps still immature, IMO. Still relying on headers without any kind of callbacks or 2-way verification, even with Oracle apps.

No

Too many HA interfaces.

Customer Service:

Poor. The EBS Access Gate support was delivered as a patch and support was not able to solve various problems, which I believe to be attributes to more current versions of OAM and WebLogic not being backwards compatible with the documented solution.

Technical Support:

Great blog content from A-Team at Fusion Middleware Security blog.

I've used Symplified, SiteMinder in other shops. This was an Oracle shop, so there was no discussion on which solution was best.

Only because I was familiar. I doubt a first-timer would be able to navigate the documentation.

I was the sole implementer as an independent contractor.

Cannot divulge.

Not in this case.

Consider alternatives. There's nothing specific to OAM required to provide SSO to Oracle applications.

It provides us the ability to control who can get to what systems. It's been a challenge for us because it's definitely different from the old 10g SSO piece. We've had a few more challenges with that than we did with the old technology.

The good part of it is that it provides us a great deal of flexibility. With the Access Management Suite, you get identity federation, virtual directory and various other things so we can combine all of our backend Active Directory and other pieces into a directory that looks like one directory, including external users, vendors, and outside people with whom we have partnerships.

It needs to be simpler to install and simpler to maintain. There's lots of little pieces and moving parts, it seems. For a smaller shop like us, it's not an easy thing to move into.

We've been using it for about two years.

It's been too unstable for us, mainly because we had some firewall issues, so we had to figure out a lot of those. We've had a couple of false-starts with the product. That's one of the things you get when you try to do it all yourself and don't get external help.

We've never really had a need to scale it much. It's documented fairly well, so I don't have an issue with that at all.

They're always hiring new people, so if you get a new person, it's somewhat chancy on getting good support, but they have excellent people generally. Eventually you can get to somebody who's excellent, especially if your problem is a challenging one. It's easy to escalate it and get it up there.

I've always thought working with Oracle support has been much better than any other vendor we've worked with. They're always improving their website and making it more helpful. I've been very pleased with their support.

You can adapt any thing that you want to authenticate like (LDAP, Own Databases, Security Providers as RSA, Gemalto, WatchData, Vasco and so on).

Before using OAM we authenticated via RSA Web Services, Web Services are quick but OAM lets us be scalable and provides a performance improvement.

The JDK version that use is too old (JDK 6), some of RuntimeExceptions are relative to OSGi and Oracle dont provide information about it.

1 year

Yes, the classloader to deploy a Custom OAM Plugin is very difficult to understand, and its relative to OSGi framework.

No

No

Good

Bad, when we have problems Oracle Support doesn't fix it.

Like OAM no, we use workaround web services with RSA.

Yes, when you try to deploy and don't know exactly which, you can develop Custom OAM Plugins you need to search also about the OSGi Framework, this framework is the base of OAM Custom Plugins, and Oracle doesn't offer much documentation about it.

In-house but use Oracle Support account and their level of expertise is good but don't fix the problems very well.

At the beginning it was very difficult when I developed my first Custom OAM Plugin it took me around 2 months. Now I develop the same plugins in few minutes or max in 2 hours.

Read about OSGi Framework before developing Custom OAM Plugins.