Vendors are ramping up their efforts to address enterprise identity management with products designed to manage user privileges across multiple platforms, to simulate the impact of potential changes and to help developers build more secure applications.

Computer Associates, IBM and Oracle last week announced upgraded applications in their respective access and identity management product suites. The software tools can separately help IT managers assign access rights, monitor ongoing privileges and ensure authorization policies are met.

CA unveiled its eTrust Identity and Access Management tool kit, which is for developers looking to build security policies into applications.

"CA is offering some of their identity management features as an embedded component," says Mike Neuenschwander, associate research director at Burton Group. "Application developers can make use of the toolkit to quickly add identity features to their applications."

A developer using the product would install the tool kit on a server, use the SDK to find libraries and pull policies from a shared store. CA says the tool kit can be used to help IT managers monitoring applications to more quickly determine when policies aren't met.

The tool kit starts at US$5,000.

Separately, IBM this week introduced Tivoli Identity Manager 4.6, which includes features designed to help IT managers link user authorizations to specific workflows to better pinpoint the source of a change and alert the proper people if a change conflicts with security or compliance policies. IBM also added a policy simulation feature that will help IT managers determine the impact of a change to access or authorization policies before they roll the change out.

Version 4.6 is a Web-based product that installs on a cluster of application servers and depends on distributed software agents and other collection methods to gather directory, access and authorization data from third-party systems. The software is expected to be available by the third quarter. IBM would not disclose pricing.

Oracle also made identity management news with its updated Identity Management suite, which now supports more third-party platforms. Specifically, Oracle announced its COREid Access and Identity application, part of the suite, can now support IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic Portal Servers. Oracle says this will help IT managers provide more secure access to applications and content delivered through these portals.

Pricing for COREid Access and Identity starts at US$15 per user.