A federation is defined as "an association formed by merging several groups or parties". A federated environment (as defined in the identity management realm) is one in which organizations that provide services and identity data (business partners) have established trust in order to share access to a set of protected resources while protecting the same from unauthorized access. Oracle Identity Federation enables business partners to achieve this by providing the mechanism with which companies can form a federation and securely share services and data across their respective security domains.
With the 11g Release 2 (11.1.2.3) of Oracle Access Management, the standalone Oracle Identity Federation product has begun it's integration with Oracle Access Manager. This chapter introduces the integrated Identity Federation and includes the following topics