Oracle Adaptive Access Manager

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Rapid growth in online commerce has brought increasing sophistication of internet fraud. Threats from Phishing, Pharming, Trojans, Key Logging, and Proxy Attacks, combined with regulations and mandates (such as FFIEC, HIPAA, PCI) governing online data privacy, place online security at a premium. Customers must feel protected for online business channels to grow.

Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) is part of the Oracle Identity Management product suite that provides protection for businesses and their customers through strong yet easy-to-deploy multifactor authentication and proactive, real-time fraud prevention. Oracle acquired the company "Bharosa" which means 'trust' in the Hindi language to extend Oracle's ability to offer its customers comprehensive web-based access management solutions. Combined with Oracle's identity management products, these innovative solutions deliver the next generation of adaptive, risk-based access management providing its customers with a comprehensive set of tools to protect and manage access to their assets..

Bharosa was founded by Thomas Varghese in 2003, a research scientist and a serial enterprenuer by background with a simple premise that existing authentication technologies were not good enough and no authentication technology can really provide its full and intended security benefits unless the computer and network is re-designed from the gorunds up. This is because security is always an after-thought on a computer (originally designed purely for computing) and the network (originally intended for pure communications). So the Bharosa technology plaform was designed to provide a two-way trust between the end user and vice versa in a compromized (phishing, pharming, keyloggers, malware, etc) environment. Within three years of its founding the company was the leader in its space and succeeded in securing 5 of the top 25 banks, 5 of the top 25 credit unions, some of the largest healthcare research organizations, some of the largest eCommerce and SAAS offerings in the industry including some of the software installations within the United States Air Force.

Today most of the security vendors that offer authentication solutions also offer similar offerings in this space as this has been a proven solution for deterring fraudsters in the Internet age.

Oracle Adaptive Access Manager has two components, the strong Authentication-agnostic security component and the application-agnsotic Risk component. One simple example of the Strong Authentication component is that user can choose a personalized keypad and use mouse clicks to enter password to prevent passwords being stolen with key loggers and being phished or pharmed. The Risk Component analyzes the authentication and transaction data for abnormalities and anamolies in real time to prevent fraud and also in offline mode to identify and detect any fraud.