PingIdentity’s PingDirectory

PingIdentity, founded in 2002, is a major identity management vendor supporting both on-premises and cloud deployments. Its flagship product, PingFederate, brought identity federation to thousands of customers. After being acquired by Vista Equity in June 2016, PingIdentity acquired UnboundID in August 2016, adding advanced directory technology, Customer IAM (CIAM) capabilities, and complementing PingOne Directory IDaaS.

Directory services underpin all IAM functions because they store user identifiers and attributes such as organizational data, location, nationality, and group memberships that drive authorization decisions. Directories have progressed beyond early X.500 approaches; LDAP remains foundational, with Microsoft Active Directory as an enhanced LDAP implementation. Organizations may also store identity attributes in SQL databases, and increasingly in NoSQL systems (e.g., MongoDB) to capture non-standard or unstructured data. Many enterprises use virtual directories to present unified, scoped views over multiple sources, abstracting complexity for applications and administrators.

As IAM moved to the cloud, providers expanded from SaaS-focused identity to full Identity-as-a-Service offerings. Meanwhile, scaling requirements intensified: workforce IAM typically serves up to hundreds of thousands of users, while CIAM must reliably serve hundreds of millions. PingDirectory (from UnboundID) is positioned as a highly scalable, feature-rich directory capable of unifying identities across LDAP, AD, RDBMS, MDM, and other sources for both workforce and customer environments. It offers LDAP and REST/SCIM interfaces, synchronization and unification, storage for structured and unstructured attributes, encryption, modern password hashing, and low-latency scalability via proxy-based horizontal scaling. It also emphasizes security controls (PII policy access, privileged account alerting, tamper-evident logs) and operational manageability (dashboards, topology tools, promotion of configurations across environments), while relying on third-party tools for advanced identity analytics.

• PingIdentity was founded in 2002.
• Vista Equity acquired PingIdentity in June 2016.
• PingIdentity acquired UnboundID in August 2016.
• PingDirectory can be licensed separately or obtained as part of bundled PingIdentity solutions.
• PingDirectory supports LDAP and REST/SCIM interfaces.
• PingDirectory supports password hashing with PBKDF2, Scrypt, and Bcrypt.
• PingDirectory supports proxy-based load balancing and horizontal scalability using LDAPv3 proxy capabilities.
• PingDirectory can handle transaction volumes up to 2.5 billion per day.
• PingIdentity has a customer base of more than 1,500 customers.
• PingDirectory supports administrator MFA via SMS OTP (Twilio), email OTP, or integration with third-party MFA providers.

• “Directory services are the foundation of Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems.”
• “Applications need to be insulated from changes in the underlying IAM architecture.”
• “Providing unified directory services is an imperative in complex enterprises.”
• “These methods are preferred over virtual directory solutions, in that, directory unification is a much better model for low-latency, high-availability and write-critical environments.”
• “In many cases the legacy directories can eventually be removed, which means the unification model is also more secure and cost-effective than a virtual directory approach.”
• “Administrators can set up multiple instances of PingDirectory in a layered architecture to handle consistently high loads as well as special events that may cause surges of user information requests.”
• “PingDirectory can alert administrators of privileged account usage.”
• “Moreover, system logs can be encrypted and made tamper-evident, and it supports masking of PII in logs.”
• “Advanced identity analytics require 3rd party applications, for which APIs are provided.”
• “Whether installed locally or in the cloud, PingDirectory is easy to manage, with an intuitive administrative interface.”