Making It Work

Making It Work

Companies are using Oracle technologies to build private clouds, and integrate with public clouds, while ensuring security.

hen Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University needed to integrate

public and private cloud services with

a variety of internal applications, the institution turned to Oracle for the middleware technology to tie it all together. The result was a secure yet flexible set of IT services that feature elastic capacity, high user service levels, and unwavering business continuity.

A CHEN I-HU

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Embry-Riddle uses Oracle Identity Manager to manage a large, “The low cost and obvious convenience of cloud services makes dynamic user population efficiently and securely, automatically

them appealing, but you need to be able to control access, manage provisioning and deprovisioning access privileges and requirements

identities, and provision resources safely,” says Eric Fisher, director as students, faculty, and staff change. This identity management

of middleware at Embry-Riddle. “Oracle identity management system, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products,

tools help us overcome some of the resistance with respect to ‘who enables the university to avail itself of both public and private

owns my data,’ data security, authorizing access to IT resources, cloud computing services, as well as hosted applications from an

management, control, and so forth.”

application service provider—and yet still provide users with a Embry-Riddle is not alone in looking to clouds. Cloud consistent online experience.

computing—essentially on-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources—is gaining in popularity with many enterprise IT departments. In particular, companies are focusing on their own clouds, which are operated and managed in-house. Commonly called “private clouds” and based on proven technologies such as grid comput- ing, virtualization, clustering, SOA, and identity management, these new architectures can scale incre- mentally while providing the flexibility to adjust resources to meet dynamic business priorities.

Private clouds have certain advantages over public clouds— among others, greater control over security, data privacy, compliance, and quality of service. “A private cloud for the exclusive use of a single organization can deliver many of cloud’s agility and efficiency benefits while maintaining control over security and privacy, regulatory compliance, and legal and contractual issues, particularly at larger enterprises in security-sensitive domains,” says Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of product development at Oracle.

Many companies agree with this assessment. In a survey of 95 IT executives that was conducted at the 2009 Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Oregon, nearly 85 percent of respondents said they intend to keep their cloud initiatives within their own firewalls. A full 49 percent of the IT executives surveyed—representing the research, manufacturing, government and education industries—cited

“The low cost and obvious convenience of cloud services makes them appealing, but you need to be able to control access,

security as a chief concern with

manage identities, and provision resources safely,” says Eric Fisher, director of middleware at Embry-Riddle.

cloud computing.

CHARITY DE MEER

MAY/JUNE 2010 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE

“We use Oracle Identity Management to degree audit system, and others. “Oracle

Virtual Directory was particularly useful in

create and manage all the accounts in real these implementations because it enabled us

time on this cloud system.” to provide the required custom operational

attributes quickly, without making extensive —Eric Fisher, Director of Middleware, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

modifications to our enterprise directory,” says Fisher.