REDWOOD SHORES: Oracle recently announced that it has acquired Bridgestream, Inc., a leading provider of Enterprise Role Management software. Enterprise Role Management has emerged as a key component of identity management deployments to improve overall security and address regulatory requirements. By adding Bridgestream’s leading role discovery, definition and management capabilities to Oracle’s widely adopted access management and user provisioning solutions, Oracle provides the most comprehensive and feature-rich identity management solution. Oracle’s Identity and Access Management Suite is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, the industry’s fastest growing, most standards-compliant, and best-of-breed technology foundation for Service-Oriented Architecture.

“With the acquisition of Bridgestream, Oracle can help organisations streamline compliance related tasks and automate role management,” Oracle’s Identity Management and Security Products Vice President Hasan Rizvi said. “We believe that the combination of Bridgestream’s Enterprise Role Management capabilities and Oracle Identity Management will enable the next generation of integration between security and business process controls by delivering a closed-loop solution that combines role discovery, modelling, enforcement, attestation and audit in a single integrated solution.”

Increased focus on compliance regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, has created a need for organisations to strictly control access to sensitive systems and monitor access privileges regularly. However, managing and monitoring who has access to what, on an individual user and resource basis, can be costly for large organisations. Bridgestream’s SmartRoles and Discoverer products address these issues by enabling role-based access control, where privileges are grouped by business roles, managing access and improving compliance. Enterprises use these products for analysing existing access rights to define candidate roles, administering roles across the entire user population and enforcing segregation of duties during role assignment.

“Bridgestream’s core competency in Enterprise Role Management complements Oracle’s already strong presence in identity and access management,” Bridgestream’s President and CEO Mark Tice said. “This combination will enable us to accelerate the deployment of identity management solutions for our joint customers and prospects.”