Fusion Applications Security

The Fusion security architecture in Fusion is quite different from EBS and relates to real world scenarios better. Fusion security is externalized from Applications and moved to standardized Fusion Middleware, OPSS and LDAP.

Management of enterprise users and roles in fusion applications is done via Oracle Identity Manager (OIM). OIM manages this data in a database and keeps it in sync with the LDAP directory.

Management of enterprise users and roles in fusion applications is done via Oracle Identity Manager (OIM). OIM manages this data in a database and keeps it in sync with the LDAP directory. OAM is authentication, authorization, and auditing solution that provides centralized security administration. This includes functionality for access control, single sign-on (separate from Oracle Single Sign-On), personalization, and user profile management in heterogeneous application environments across a variety of application servers, legacy applications, and databases. OAM provides key features for creating, managing, and enforcing access policies. In Fusion v1, the LDAP server will hold both the Identity Store and the Policy Store. Identity store holds users and external roles. Policy store holds Application roles, Function and Data security policies.

Fusion ships with a full pre-seeded set of Job Roles. Separation of Jobs and Duty allows access control to be customized to a company’s particular organization

   • You can add/change jobs and their duties

   • You can add/change duties and their privileges

Below is a comparison of EBS security with Fusion Apps.

Job Role -> Top Level Menu

Data Role -> Responsibility

Duty Role -> Sub Menu

Privilege -> Form Function

Permission -> Executable

However, at times you may need to create a new set of policies, duties and job roles. I will try to demonstrate the steps necessary to setup this using an example in another article.

Oracle Fusion Install - On premise (Bare Metal, OVM) or Hosted

Whoever is implementing Oracle Fusion will definitely have to answer the following question; 

Do you need to have the Oracle Fusion environment hosted on your premises or do you want to host with a third party or host this in Oracle via the Saas or OnDemand model?

To add some more complexity, Oracle provides you with option either to install the application on 'bare metal' or leverage Oracle Virtual Machines (OVM) to host all components.

Our experience has been that the fastest and easiest way to get going is if you use hosting service of Oracle or some third-party. However, the flip side of using a hosted applications is that you will see an increase in the turnaround time if you are upgrading, applying patches or debugging, which will be quite high in the initial days and you should keep a buffer for all these exigencies in your project plan.

The next best alternative is to use an on-premise OVM install. You can be up and running in 3 days. Internally at Wipro we are able to set up an environment using OVM install in less than 3 days. The last route is to go for a bare-metal install. This is quite a challenge from DBA perspective and can take well over 2 weeks to set up the environment. Oracle ships both bare-metal as well as OVM versions of the releases, so customers can choose either of these.

Oracle Fusion Applications - Next generation in ERP

Oracle Fusion Apps is the next generation in ERP space. It's completely web-based and takes in the best in class of all products under the Oracle umbrella. Some truely world-class features include the following:

- co-exist with third party legacy applications, thereby giving huge business benefits where customers have already invested heavily in legacy applications and want to plug and play Fusion Apps with existing system.

- Best in class user roles and responsibility features. Truely amazing if we compare this with R11i and R12 stack of products.

- Complete web-based solution, so no hassles of installing client thin or thick. Only thing that you need to be up and running is a browser. Fusion works great on Google chrome, Mozilla along with IE.

- Oracle Fusion Applications feature embedded business intelligence. So, you have plenty of Dashboards, BI reports, smart reporting tools like Smartview (uses an excel add-in) and FR Studio (again uses the best from Hyperion reporting)

- complete SOA based architecture, makes processing and integration real cool.