Manufacturing and Retail industry is subject to more opportunities and challenges than ever before.

Technology has provided new ways to discover and service markets, uncover customer preferences, control processes and inventories, manage workforces, and sell products to customers. At the same time, technology has increased the vulnerability of manufacturers & retailers to liability and fraud, and has heightened customer concerns about the safety of doing business electronically. Security concerns are motivating increased requirements for compliance with regulatory and industry standards. For example, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) requires that merchants and payment service providers:

• Protect stored cardholder data
• Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
• Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
• Track and monitor all access to network resource and cardholder data
• Maintain a policy that addresses data security

Amerindia can implement Oracle Identity Management solution that will help manufacturers & retailers address these requirements and more, by protecting user identity data with a secure, scalable and highly available infrastructure, centralizing application access control, automating routine account management activities, and meeting regulatory requirements for reporting and attestation. All this is achieved with an infrastructure that is open, built with best-in class technologies, and application centric.

Access Management

Web applications are critical to the retail industry. Companies use these to create links with supply chain partners, improve logistics, build customer loyalty, and sell their products through e-stores. Oracle Access Manager delivers a highly robust solution for providing manageable, secure, access control to employee, customer, and partner facing web applications based on business policies. It’s scalable

Architecture supports the largest e-store applications, while its delegated administration makes it easy to distribute responsibilities for user administration to different localities, suppliers or store brands.

Building federated user communities that span company boundaries represents an opportunity for retailers to implement consumer product cross-selling strategies,streamline supplier access to their extranet applications, and respond quickly to organizational changes such as mergers and acquisitions. Oracle Identity Federation implements standards-based web technology that makes these kinds of Interactions possible. It is critical that retailers protect themselves and their consumers from increasingly sophisticated online attacks. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager protects customer Identity and credit information through a form of mutual authentication such that a consumer can be sure they are transacting with their online retailer before providing any confidential information. Further, if a customer should fall prey to a phishing scam and inadvertently provide their username and password to a malicious party, the online retailer has the ability to prevent that malicious party from using the credentials by immediately stopping suspicious buying behavior.

User Provisioning and Role Management

Retailers also need to manage access to their business applications by a large and constantly changing user population. Oracle Identity Manager meets this need by centralizing and automating user account and privilege management. Oracle Identity Manger connects with applications such as Oracle Human Capital Management, Oracle Retail, and time card systems to quickly create accounts for new associates. Oracle Role Manager allows the new hires to be assigned privileges based on their specific job requirements and re-assigns privileges as employees’ roles within the organization change.

Directory Services

With high-profile security breaches in the news, retailers need to be vigilant about protecting user identity and cardholder profiles. Oracle Internet Directory is a secure repository for user identity data that combines the mission-critical strength ofthe Oracle Database with the open compatibility of the LDAP v3 directory standard, resulting in a user identity store that is scalable, secure and delivers the high availability required for e-store and commerce sites. One of the challenges of implementing web security for many retailers today is that user identity data is frequently scattered across multiple systems around the world. Sometimes this is the result of mergers and acquisitions, other times this is by design to address regional privacy concerns. Oracle Virtual Directory supports rapid deployment of new applications by providing a real-time, virtual view of identity data from any data-store including directories, databases and Web Services, without synchronization.

Summary

Oracle Identity Management offers the solutions retailers need to address the unique challenges they face with an integrated, standards-based and open set of products that fit into existing infrastructures. The results are less time spent integrating disparate components and the backing of the world's largest enterprise software company. Visit www.oracle.com/identity for more information.

Source: Oracle-� http://www.netganley.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/SB_Oracle_Identity_Retail.pdf