IT Infrastructure

The IT infrastructure includes all the hardware servers, operating systems, and integrated applications that will be integrated into the Access Manager deployment. Consider the following:

• What applications will leverage Access Manager?

  Applications might include critical internal applications such as those for human resources and accounting or less-critical employee portals. Also leveraging the functionality of Access Manager might be external business-to-business applications that deal with both confidential financial information and less confidential sales material, or business-to-consumer shopping carts that are concerned with credit card data and purchase histories.

• What systems will leverage Access Manager?

  Consider the hardware on which applications are being deployed as well as their operating systems. An Access Manager deployment, at the minimum, includes a web container to run the application, a Sun Java System Directory Server (or existing data store), and Access Manager. Additional hardware servers might run their own web containers with corporate resources and on which Access Manager policy agents can be installed for improved security purposes.

• What Access Manager services will each department leverage?

  Consider the default and custom services integrated within Access Manager. Role and policy strategies will have to be mapped and defined for each department. Authentication modules need to be assessed and custom services, if any, need to be developed.

Other technical considerations also include:

• Are there incompatibilities in the infrastructure?

• Does the current system experience slowdowns or down time?

• Are the applications sufficiently secure?

• Are there virus control procedures?

• Can applications be customized based on user entitlements?

For more information, see Evaluating Applications.