M&S Consulting Achieves ISO 9001:2015 Certification

Brandon JonesBig Data & BI, Cloud and Virtualization, Higher Education, Identity & Access Management, News and Updates, Notes, Oracle, Project Management, Salesforce, SAPLeave a Comment

MORGANTOWN, WV – M&S Consulting is proud to announce our achievement of ISO 9001:2015 certification. ISO 9001:2015 was selected specifically to validate our ability to exceed the quality expectations and requirements of our customers. ISO 9001:2015 is a globally recognized quality management standard developed and published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The certification provides a model for companies of all types and sizes to use in building an effective quality management system. The standard is based on several quality management principles, including having a strong customer focus, involvement of high-level company management, a process-based approach, and ongoing improvement. … Read More

On-Premises Identity and Access Management – Vendor + Product + Feature Matrix (2021)

Ben MarckCloud and Virtualization, Identity & Access Management, Offerings, Oracle, SAP, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

Finding the best Identity Management (IdM) products for your enterprise is not a trivial task. This is especially true when different products from different vendors that accomplish other objectives or services have remarkably similar (and therefore confusing) naming conventions. Not unlike other COTS enterprise suites, the ‘cloudification’ of these products has matured rapidly. To help layout the current Identity Management vendor/product landscape as we see it, we’ve put together the following matrix of products by vendors. Click Here to enlarge the table below. Identity management is challenging in today’s world, organizations must manage user identities across a wide range of … Read More

How to Register A Custom Scheduled Job or Plugin in Oracle Identity Manager (OIM)

Jimmy LutzIdentity & Access Management, Oracle, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

There are multiple scenarios where we may have to develop a custom scheduled job to perform tasks to meet client requirements. Once the expected job functionality is developed, below are the steps to register the expected job/plugin in OIM so that it can be used. Create the folder structure as follows.                 lib                 META-INF                 Plugin.xml The “lib” folder would have the jar file of the functionality that has been developed along with the dependent jar files. The “META-INF” folder should have the scheduledtask.xml file, which should hold the below content. The text displayed in RED … Read More

Smart Cards Speed Up Just-in-Time Provisioning

Jimmy LutzIdentity & Access Management, Offerings, Problem Solved, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

A large government organization hosts a common services platform for thousands of users. Their user provisioning process required manual intervention, which took time and was susceptible to error. With hundreds of thousands of users, this time and exposure to error added up. Our team optimized the user provisioning process by designing and implementing a just-in-time (JIT) provisioning solution. However, instead of relying on SSO and SAML assertions, our solution grabs the required information from the user’s two-factor authentication source, their smart card. In this way, users are automatically provisioned to the web applications as they attempt to access them, instead … Read More

Managing a Complex Migration to Oracle Cloud

Jimmy LutzCloud and Virtualization, Identity & Access Management, Oracle, Problem SolvedLeave a Comment

A publicly-traded company dealing with health information planned to migrate their primary business application suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), including Fusion Middleware components (SOA, IdAM, EDQ). The initial challenge was the number of interconnections between applications (over 70), each with complex security requirements. If the various components of the migration were not carefully timed and coordinated, the availability of critical business functions could be affected. To make it more challenging, the migration needed to be transparent to the business owners and thousands of users, with minimal downtime during cutover. Our combined team, in close collaboration with the customer, performed … Read More

Business Intelligence Hampered by a Lack of Clear Role Management

Jimmy LutzBig Data & BI, Business Strategy, Cloud and Virtualization, Higher Education, Identity & Access Management, Industry Trends, Problem SolvedLeave a Comment

A top 70 national university uses an enterprise-level solution to report on important university-wide research data and business intelligence. Access to this data is managed by roles across a multitude of schools within the university, but the lack of role management across the university was limiting access and use. To complicate things, the various stakeholders were initially reluctant to adopt a university-wide role framework or standard policy for provisioning and de-provisioning. In short: identity and access management (IAM) were inefficient and disjointed. Our team developed and implemented a phased approach to implement role-based access control (RBAC) framework to upgrade its … Read More

Cloud POC Demonstrates value to government agency

Jimmy LutzCloud and Virtualization, Identity & Access Management, Oracle, Problem SolvedLeave a Comment

A large government organization intended to use Oracle User Productivity Kit to create and publish training material. Unfortunately, the original procurement did not obtain the necessary hardware resources. After collecting requirements and working with cloud providers, our team was able to obtain operating credits for a proof of concept (POC) that would enable all required functionality and security. The POC was also able to deliver additional functionality, including single sign-on, virtual desktop infrastructure, and shared storage. We were able to demonstrate not only the effectiveness of a cloud architecture but also the reduction in implementation and maintenance costs. If you’d … Read More