The approach, which the company calls service-oriented security, is meant to help organizations simplify and centralize critical security tasks, including authentication, user administration and role management.

In a keynote address April 10 during the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle server technologies development, said businesses today are challenged to deal with the growing number of users accessing their systems.

To address that challenge, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Role Manager, software designed to permit organizations to centrally model, define and manage business roles and relationships to enable tighter access control.