Diorectory diagram

What is a Directory?

Whether you’re managing customer, employee or partner identities, it’s critical to have a modern data store that’s tailored for identity attributes—enabling you to deliver unified user profiles and a single source of truth across your enterprise.

How Does a Directory Benefit My Business?

Unified Customer Experience

Your customers expect you to prove you really know them by delivering personalized interactions across in-person and digital channels and giving them the ability to view and manage their own profile.

Keep Identity and Profile Data Safe

Your user identity data is one of the most valuable resources you have. Unfortunately, it’s also a target for attackers. It’s imperative that you keep your user data safe with a directory solution that can bring your data together, protect it from attacks and encrypt it in every state.

A Single Source of Truth

Once you’ve established your master user record, you can choose to decommission fragile legacy data stores to lighten your management load and reduce your attack surface at the same time.  

What Capabilities Does a Ping Directory Offer?

Ping’s directory solution enables you to:

Bidirectionally synchronize icon

Bidirectionally synchronize existing data stores, including Microsoft Active Directory, LDAPv3, SCIM 2.0, RDBMS, MDM, CRM and more

User profiles icon

Augment your existing user profiles with structured and unstructured application-specific attributes

Developer icon

Deliver access to a unified profile through developer-friendly REST APIs

Integrated proxy icon

Optimize load balancing, rate limiting and data transformation with an integrated proxy

How a Modern Directory Works

Flexible Support for Any Application

Most enterprise and legacy on-premise apps still access directories using LDAP; however, cloud or SaaS provisioning usually expects SCIM and REST APIs. A modern directory is both legacy compatible and future-proof.

Faster Time to Market for New Apps and Services

With support for all the ways apps expect to access directories plus the ability to mimic proprietary directory behavior and support flexible JSON schemas, a modern directory is able to quickly consolidate your identity silos.

Extreme Scale, Performance and Availability

A modern directory scales to handle millions of entries with sub-millisecond latency and extremely high availability—which is critical for environments where seconds and minutes matter.

How a modern directory works diagram

How Do You Deliver a Single Source of Truth for Identities?

Imagine how frustrating it is for customers to update their address on your web app, then have to update it again once they log into your mobile app.

 

But creating a single source of truth in a centralized directory is anything but a slam dunk when you have multiple identity repositories supporting various production applications. If your enterprise is like most, you’ve added new apps and channels over time and additional data silos to support them.

 

How do you deliver a single source of truth for directories

Deliver a Unified Customer Experience

You need a modern high-performance directory that can be deployed on premises, in the cloud or both. Plus, one that’s designed for scale and flexibility and can support regulatory compliance. Then you can synchronize your disparate data silos into one secure, high-performance data store. No matter if you perform a one-time data migration or utilize ongoing, real-time, bidirectional data synchronizations, you can create a single source of truth about your customers, partners and employees.

Centralized customer profile icon

Synchronize data stores to create a centralized customer profile that enables personalization and consistency across channels

Billions of attributes icon

Scale to hundreds of millions of customers with billions of attributes (even at peak usage) so your customers never lose access

Unstructured data icon

Store unstructured data as an identity attribute so your customer profiles include every important detail

Encrypted data icon

Encrypt data in every state (at rest, in motion and in use) to help avoid costly data breaches and regulatory issues

Modernize legacy directories diagram

Modernize at Your Pace

After deploying your directory from Ping, you migrate and/or synchronize your data with high performance and throughput to rapidly move identity and profile data from DSEE, Active Directory, RDBMS and other repositories. Once you have your legacy servers and modern directory in sync, you can migrate applications all at once or phased over time at your own pace.

Manage Identities Across Hybrid IT

Applications need access to a consistent set of identity data regardless of where they’re deployed. The ability to deploy a directory solution on premises, in private cloud environments or to leverage a fully hosted directory solution, gives you the deployment versatility you need and helps you create a unified profile across your hybrid IT environment.

Diagram showing how to manage identities with hybrid IT

Ping’s Directory Services and Solutions

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See how Ping can help you deliver secure employee, partner, and customer experiences in a rapidly evolving digital world.