Term Paper on "Job Portal Security"

Term Paper 11 pages (3023 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Job Portal Security

The objective of this work is to conduct a case study for the purpose of developing a job portal identification method or technique for authentication of the users. This is to be implemented by networking a job site with colleges across the world. The portal entry will begin from their student college web account and will connect securely with a job site. Such a system is described in the document entitled: "Oracle Open World" the design proposed herein is a system that would be compatible with the one instituted by Oracle for the Higher Education reported in the work of Matthew (2005) and reported in the document entitled: "Oracle Open World: An Enterprise Portal in 90 Days - Critical Factors Behind a Successful Portal Implementation in Higher Education."

INTRODUCTION

The work entitled: "Mechanics of Oracle Portal and Identity Management" (2003) written by Sanjeev Mohan states the fact portals are becoming "...one-stop shop for organizations wanting to share corporate information deep in a multitude of stovepipe applications. Portals provide a single point of access to the applications through a secure and highly customizable and personalizable user interface." (2003) Mohan additionally states that portals are a way of making the provision of "critical information and services to organization's employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders. Based on the roles o fend users, they have access to embedded applications or portlets, such as, self-service, HR apps, collaboration tools like web-based email and calendaring, financial data, etc." (2003) Mohan's work demonstrates the necessary steps in building an enterprise portal which include: (1) Designing the architecture of the portal; (2) evaluating and selecting the software layers needed to build the portal; (3) Understanding the LDAP concepts in order to set up authentication via the Directory architecture; (4) Setting up the Portal for users to customize and personalize their experience; (5) authenticating the users through a single sign on (SSO) mechanism; and (6) Extending the portal via mobile devices. (2003) Benefits of building a portal include: (1) Higher productivity for the employees by providing single point of access to integrated applications; (2) Better employee communication and collaboration; (3) More efficient business process and improvements; (4) Help make an organization more competitive. A well-designed portal could provide an organization with a differentiation over its competition; (5) Better customer satisfaction and retention; (6) Lower cost and better utilization of the staff e.g. It support, HR staff etc.; and (8) Lower cost by reducing the number of servers. (Mohan, 2003)

PORTAL OVERVIEW

The term, 'portal' is "often misused and many describe it an entry point into a single site. E.g a company's home page. The term is popular with sites like Yahoo, Excite, MSN, etc. Portal however is much more than a generic web site. They cater to a number of people..." (Mohan, 2003) the portal in actually may be classified as follows:

Enterprise Portal: Supports organization's customer's and employee's needs through provision of an integrated access to applications and services. The enterprise portal may be created as an internal corporate portal for corporate consumption or as an eBusiness portal for external users.

Public Internet Portals: Yahoo & other public sources

Appliance Portals: Through use of handhelds (PDAs, cellphones, etc.); and Vertical portals: Industries (insurance, law banking)

Portals are built to specifically provide services offering differentiation of features dependent upon the user and the user requirements. Therefore, the feature of the portal are varied in nature and include those as follows:

Application

These are tools that provide integration to packaged applications, such as legacy applications, ERP suites, CRM applications content and document management systems etc. Many of the applications mentioned here come with business intelligence components.

80% of the corporate data exists in files and other formats as unstructured data. This typically includes a full text indexing engine using innovative new products like Oracle's Internet File System (IFS) capable of navigating and indexing existing content. This feature also allows users to subscribe to external / syndicated content providers such a news, weather, sports and entertainment information etc.

Collaboration

One of the biggest benefits of portal is that it allows integration of collaboration tools to improve communication. These tools vary from email systems, calendar, chat, discussion boards etc. It allows end users to work together more effectively by establishing shared workspaces, shared document repositories, online meetings and real-time interaction. Notification of events and workflow are some other examples of collaboration.

Personal Organization tools

Tools used to personalize the content with end users' to-do lists, contacts / address books and other personal productivity tools.

Presentation

Most portal software segments the portal page into multiple sections or frames for each application. These applications either run within the section or may launch a new browser window when executed. Presentation tools allow end users to decide which applications they wish to see on their portal page and the layout and color schemes.

Search

Advance search capabilities that allow users to search structured as well as unstructured data. (Mohan, 2003)

From the view of the development and it support staff the portal features include the following aspects:

Identity Management and Security

User management is one of the biggest components of building a portal. The users need to be authenticated correctly and need to have their profiles available so that they can have access to the authorized set of applications and services (role management). Security issues become even more important when multiple applications are accessed from one place, the portal using the Single Sign on (SSO).

Content Management

Since portals may include structured and unstructured content from multiple internal as well as external sources being refreshed at varying intervals, content management becomes a critical component. Portals have adapters to extract data from the underlying systems. However, if there is no adapter out of the box for an application then the adapter must be written. Content management also includes taxonomy management.

Infrastructure well designed portal must be reliable, highly available and able to scale to the requirements of the ever-growing end user community. The infrastructure may include load balancing, caching, and other performance enhancements.

User Interface Services

Most portals today present their content as HTML pages. However, some of the sophisticated interfaces may require Java plug-ins, support for wireless and mobile users etc. (Mohan, 2003)

Mohan (2003) relates that organizations in today's world are working under "hetergenous systems. Each system may be working very efficiently to deliver the information needed by organizations but the systems are a world unto themselves. Most systems in the past were not built with the notion that one day they should be able to freely share information with other systems. Hence, what organizations have ended up with today are stovepipe applications." The following figure illustrates some consolidation techniques as cited in Mohan (2003)

Mohan (2003) states that the figure above demonstrates the fact that integration can take place any many levels in the organization and that each level of integration brings about a solution to a specific problem and has both negative and positive aspects as a result. Various solutions are stated by Mohan (2003) to include: (1) Integration of databases - This involves consolidating multiple smaller databases into an enterprise database. It allows organizations to retire multiple smaller ad hoc databases and maybe even legacy databases and the respective applications into a more stable and larger database but is only applicable for us in small applications; (2) Data warehouse - This has been one of the most common ways of creating a single view of disparate data. Enterprise-wide data warehousing projects are usually very large and time consuming. They involve extracting the data from multiple systems, transforming in to a data model for the data warehouse and then loading the data. The tool that is sued for this purpose is called Extraction, Transforming and Loading tool (ETL). Once the data warehouse is built, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) reporting tools are used to derive the intelligence. Well-known ETL tool vendors are Informatica and Ascential. Major OLAP vendors are: Cognos, Business Objects, Brio, Hyperion and MicroStrategy; (3) EAI tools provide a bridge that allows data to be exchanged from one system to another in a transparent manner and made available to a client application. EAI layer is highly dependant on open standards so that the systems can communicate easily. Some of these stands are Java Message System (JMS) and Java Connector Architecture (JCA). Major EAI vendors include: IBM MQ Series, TIBCO, Vitria, Web Methods and SeeBeyond; (4) Application level integration has required the use of distributed computing technologies that integrate systems and application distributed over a network of systems using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). Some of the common manifestations of RPC architectures are Object Management's Group's CORBA and Microsoft's COM/DCOM. While these technologies have been around for a long time they are limited because they don't use open standards. For instance, in the case of CORBA, all nodes would need to run the same Object Request Broker (ORB) product; (5) Web Services is the newest kid on the block. It is… READ MORE

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