Deployment of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager in a clustered environment at LINUX Platform

Abstract

The project is being pursued under the collaboration of NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, IBM Pakistan and Software Productivity Strategists, Pakistan. The purposes of this project are research and deployment oriented. The aim is to successfully deploy IBM Tivoli Identity Manager at Linux Platform, and then configure it with different target applications. Some of the major issues faced by organizations today are related to the security of their information and the management of their users. Organizations want their users to be provisioned automatically; role-based access is granted to them over different resources, re-certification and reconciliation should run regularly in order to remove security threats or unauthorized users. Thus, definition of Identity cycle and then Automating Identity Management has become one of the core competencies of any large business organization. Tivoli Identity Manager provides solution to all the issues mentioned above, thus providing a comprehensive package for the organization. Main purpose of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager delivers the required visibility, control and automation needed to achieve business growth. It provides a secure, automated and policy based user management solution that helps address the basic legacy issues of modern business organization. It helps effectively manage user privileges across heterogeneous IT sources i.e. target applications. It is a comprehensive request based provisioning for end users, managers or delegated administrators to easily request user access to roles, accounts such as shared folders and web portlets. It automates business processes related to change in user identities by using life cycle management. The focus of the project revolves around the successful deployment of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager at Linux Platform and then configuring it with target applications namely Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Active Directory. Relevant documentation about IBM Technologies is not readily available except for Red Books; hence ample amount of importance has been laid on the documentation part of the project. At the successful completion of the project, IBM Tivoli Identity Manager Version 5.0 has been deployed (in Linux Environment). The target application or remote resources as they are generally called have been installed and configured to communicate with Tivoli Server. Administration of the Tivoli Identity Manager has been carried out keeping in mind a sample organization. The purpose of the administration was to highlight the business advantage that is provided by the IBM Security framework. IBM Tivoli Systems always have issues configuring their systems with other target applications and this issue gets more complicated due to the lack of proper documentation support. In this project, we have tried not only to deploy the Tivoli system but also to fill the gap of documentation. The future work which may be carried out can be the deployment of Tivoli Identity Manager at NUST level, so as to automate certain functions like Student Management, Employee Management etc. IBM being business partners of NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science provided us the installation media through the Academic Initiative Accounts, and this collaboration may result in many fruitful projects being carried out in future.