Sun rebrands, releases Vaau roles management tools

Company plans to extend identity platform with governance, risk, compliance features

John Fontana (Network World)
05 March, 2008 08:20
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Sun this week introduced Sun Roles Manager and positioned it as a key cog in its effort to extend its identity management platform so users can manage risk and meet compliance mandates.

Roles Manager is Sun's first product release from its November 2007 acquisition of Vaau and helps close a gap in its identity portfolio.

The software, called Vaau RBACx before the acquisition, lets users manage identities, including validating role definitions. The software also will continually compare user access privileges to assigned exceptions and log the actual resources the user is accessing.

Roles Manager includes role certification by role owners, approval workflow and role consolidation.

The software also has an analytics engine and activity monitoring features.

Sun says Roles Manager is the first in a series of new products that will be added to its identity management portfolio over the next 12 months.

The company did not disclose specific details about forthcoming products. But company officials say they plan to also work with partners and systems integrators to help extend the Sun platform, as well as develop new Sun identity products and acquire additional companies. Sun plans to focus on access management, federation, Web services security and auditing to extend its current identity management wares while incorporating governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

The company is following a trend to bolt GRC onto identity and access management and meld IT efforts with business requirements around compliance and risk.

"Any organization that is embarking on a top level GRC strategy has to have the functions of identity management and roles management along with access certification," says John Barco director of the identity portfolio for Sun. "Those are the core fundamental pieces that business and IT architecture have to have aligned across all the business unites before they can do any other part of their programs."

Roles Manager is now shipping.