F5 Teams with Oracle to Streamline Access Management

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced that the F5^® BIG-IP^® Access Policy Manager^™ (APM^™) solution can now integrate with Oracle Identity Management. Specifically, Oracle Access Manager, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, can be paired with BIG-IP APM’s access control capabilities for web applications. By integrating F5 and Oracle technologies, customers gain a centralized point of enforcement to simplify access control and auditing.

“Enterprises want streamlined integration across their heterogeneous IT assets, and the integration of F5’s BIG-IP access solutions with Oracle Access Manager gives customers a holistic enterprise architecture that simplifies authentication and reduces infrastructure costs,” said Rohit Gupta, VP of Product Management for Oracle Identity & Access Management. “F5’s unique integration architecture with Oracle Access Manager simplifies our customers’ infrastructure and support considerations for their web access management needs, while continuing to deliver higher levels of scalability.”

Details

The BIG-IP product portfolio offers high-performance access and security solutions that provide context-aware user access to web applications. With BIG-IP products, IT teams can offload authentication services from application and specialized web servers, enabling administrators to apply consistent, policy-based access control across many applications and manage access to those applications from a central location. Pairing Oracle Access Manager with BIG-IP APM gives remote and mobile users optimized, reliable, and secure access to Oracle applications. And the combined Oracle/F5 solution enables administrators to conveniently scale the infrastructure to keep pace with the burgeoning growth of mobile and remote users.

With F5 products and Oracle Access Manager, customers can:

• Consolidate Infrastructure to Reduce IT Costs – By offloading authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) functions to the BIG-IP solution, customers do not need an added tier of web proxy servers or servers running agent software. Instead, authentication functions can be performed by a single BIG-IP device, resulting in significant savings—efficient integration and consolidation can reduce authentication and web tier costs by up to 10 times.
• Simplify and Centralize Management to Save Time – With a smaller, less complex infrastructure and AAA control directly on BIG-IP devices, IT administrators can manage network identity and access control from one centralized location, applying repeatable access policies across many applications. Centralized management reduces the amount of manual intervention necessary, and enables IT to modify existing policies as regulations and business requirements change.
• Easily Scale the Infrastructure to Support a Superior User Experience – Many organizations cannot afford the expense of adding an extra tier of proxy servers to their access environments. With the combined solution, F5 helps customers easily scale their IT environment to support the rapidly increasing number of mobile workers. A single high-end BIG-IP appliance can handle hundreds of logins per second and tens of thousands of concurrent SSL encrypted user sessions, and offers multi-gigabit per second SSL encryption throughput with HTTP(s).

Additional Quotes

“Different aspects of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and web access are maturing to the point where the method of delivery is taking different forms, from appliances to services,” said Earl Perkins, Research Vice President, Gartner. “Delivering such services at logical points in the IT infrastructure, such as the network, makes sense from a performance and administration perspective because it allows commodity services and their management to be combined for best effect.”

“We work closely with vendors like Oracle so that customers can maximize the value of their technology investments,” said Mark Vondemkamp, Director of Product Management for Security at F5. “With this combined solution, it’s easy for organizations to improve their access capabilities without custom coding applications, installing additional servers, or adding agents to existing web servers. With F5’s BIG-IP APM integration with Oracle Access Manager, customers can centralize identity and access management services to reduce their infrastructure size and cost—even as user numbers and access requirements change.”

Availability

BIG-IP Access Policy Manager is available today. To learn more about the product’s integration with Oracle Access Manager, go to www.f5.com/pdf/solution-center/f5-oracle-solution-overview.pdf.

About the Oracle PartnerNetwork

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About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5's flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5’s vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

F5, BIG-IP, Access Policy Manager, and APM are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.