1 Introduction
IAM (Identity & Access Management) today is at the core of enterprise IT infrastructures for protecting digital corporate assets. IAM, as the name states, is about managing identities and their access. This involves managing user accounts and their entitlements across the variety of systems and applications in use in organizations.
Directory services are the core of IAM. Many directory services are an integral part of cloud services such as Access Management solutions delivered as IDaaS (Identity as a Service). On the other hand, some directories such as Microsoft Active Directory or Microsoft Azure Active Directory also offer commercial options for certain large-scale use cases. Directory services provide a centralized repository for managing and accessing information about all types of identities within a network. They are essential for frictionless integration with all the applications in a network by streamlining access management, user management, centralized governance visibility, and to maintain a structured database that supports authentication and authorization.
The traditional high-end, stand-alone directory servers are not as widely deployed as they were in the past, when such repositories were the foundation for both corporate directory services and the customer directories. However, there is still a need for directory services that can act as the back end, specifically around high-end use cases. Such scenarios are not rare at all, despite the lack of a hype. Some examples of these use cases are customer directories in B2C scenario, or patient directories in healthcare services.
As part of the Digital Transformation, delivering digital services involving millions of users, devices, and things has become the new normal for many businesses. These digital services require a strong identity back end, including directory services that can scale, that are highly performant, and that are extremely robust. Most cloud-based directories use elastic scaling in AWS, Azure, and GCP, which can spin up and down new instances in response to changing loads more easily than on-prem solutions. However, providing directory services comes with additional challenges such as the need for high availability and integration with customer applications. Directory services are also prone to cyber threats, so they need to be updated and monitored constantly to avoid cyber-attacks. Directory services also provide security by enforcing access control policies. This is achieved by leveraging access control lists and ensuring that the right identities have the appropriate level of access based on roles and policies.
Thus, while attention on this type of solutions is somewhat lessened in the market, there are use cases and indicators for an uptick of this market segment. From our perspective, there are various use cases and architectural approaches that make using enterprise-grade directory services not only an option, but a significant requirement.
One of the vendors in this space is Atos. Atos is the largest European IT service provider and amongst the global top five players for digital services. Eviden is an Atos business supporting its digital and cloud businesses. As part of the portfolio, Eviden delivers various IAM services and products. Amongst these, there are the DirX products, including DirX Directory as an enterprise-grade, high-end directory server.
