D Services
"the heart, soul and foundation of any Identity Management Solution"
Directories, which unite heterogeneous systems, have emerged, through their evolution from X.500 to LDAP, as one of the most valuable core components of today’s IT infrastructure. Essentially it is the heart, soul and foundation of any Identity Management Solution that provides personalised interaction with employees, partners and customers.
So what is a directory service??? often confused by many with the directory itself, which is the LDAP repository that holds the information about objects that are to be managed by the directory service, the directory service is the interface to the directory and provides access to the data that is contained in that directory. It acts as a central authority that can securely authenticate resources and manage identities and relationships between them. Directory Services are the gateway to identity.
Ok so let’s get specific without drilling down too deeply into Directory Proxies, Virtual Directories, Meta-Directories et al. A directory service is a software application —or a set of applications—that stores and organises information about a computer network's users and network shares, and that allows network administrators to manage users' access to the shares. Additionally, directory services act as an abstraction layer between users and shared resources. Directory services use a distributed model for storing their information and that information is usually replicated between directory servers.
One of the strongest benefits of directory services is they are usually highly optimised for reads and provides advanced search on the many different attributes that can be associated with objects in a directory. The data that is stored in the directory is defined by an extendable and modifiable schema. For your organisation, a strong directory foundation provides secure, convenient access to applications and services and enables interaction with employees, partners, customers and suppliers. By personalizing interaction and providing the right data to the right people at the right time, directory powered solutions create closer relationships and new opportunities for profit and growth.
