RadiantOne: Radiant Logic’s Federated Identity Suite — It’s Not Your Father’s Directory

The directory is often treated as a mere identity repository, but that view ignores its potential to integrate diverse identity information and thereby increase the value of one of the enterprise’s most critical assets: identity data spread across many systems. Historically, enterprises used an “enterprise directory” provisioned from HR or contractor systems to control application access. Microsoft Active Directory (AD) later became the default authentication source for network and on-premises Windows services, but attempts to use AD as the enterprise directory commonly fell short because an authentication directory prioritizes stability and restricts changes (such as schema updates), while an enterprise directory must remain business-flexible to support reorganizations, compliance, cloud moves, and mergers.

Cloud adoption, mobility, and hybrid environments have multiplied identity sources and consumers. Proliferating cloud identity stores increases corporate risk, while enterprises also seek unified visibility across employees and customers even though relevant data for a single individual is created and maintained in multiple systems not designed to feed an enterprise identity repository. As identity volume, attribute variety, and the number of systems grow, identity information quality becomes a security, compliance, and operational issue—often forcing slow, manual, or custom-scripted synchronization.

The text argues the directory should sit at the center of IAM as a unified source of truth that models changing relationships (people, roles, groups, devices), supports many protocols, correlates identities without shared identifiers, transforms attribute formats/semantics, and automatically synchronizes systems at scale.

Radiant Logic’s RadiantOne suite targets these needs with FID (core), ICS (correlation/synchronization/provisioning), and CFS (cloud federation). FID now includes HDAP, a Hadoop-based “Big Data Directory” that instantiates unified identity profiles from multiple sources, computes synthetic attributes, and scales to tens of millions of identities with high availability and strong encryption controls. ICS provisions “mirror identities” to target systems and identifies orphaned accounts; CFS issues federation tokens and can add two-factor authentication without application changes. Strengths include scalability, correlation/transformation, GUI tooling, provisioning/synchronization, and standards support; challenges include limited ecosystem reach, dependence on partners for core IAM components, and Windows-only deployment for CFS.

• Microsoft AD became the authentication source for employee access to corporate networks, on-premises Windows applications, and print services.
• Radiant Logic was founded in 2000 and pioneered the “virtual directory” concept.
• Radiant Logic is headquartered in Novato, California, with US offices in New York, Washington DC, and Chicago, and an office in Barcelona.
• Radiant Logic targets Fortune-1000 companies and claims 145 customers, with about 80 percent of its business in the US.
• RadiantOne includes FID (Federated Identity), ICS (Identity Correlation and Synchronization), and CFS (Cloud Federation Service), plus a legacy VDS Standard Edition.
• HDAP is a Hadoop-based data store that holds an instantiated copy of identity data gathered from multiple enterprise sources.
• Vendor-published results state a single HDAP 3-node cluster can process 120,000 queries per second with 50–100 million user identities.
• Identity attributes are encrypted in transit to FID and encrypted at rest in HDAP, replication stores, backups, and exported LDIF files.
• ICS connects out-of-the-box to Okta Universal Directory over SCIM.
• CFS is deployed on Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2.

• “This dismissal is shortsighted, however, as it ignores the potential of the Directory to serve an integrating function that maximizes the value of one of the most critical assets of today’s large enterprises: their diverse collection of identity information.”
• “An authentication directory and an enterprise directory have different priorities.”
• “The Cloud, mobility and the requirement to support the hybrid computing environment have made managing identity information significantly more complex.”
• “Proliferating identity stores in the Cloud is a significant corporate risk.”
• “Identity information quality has emerged as a distinct management issue.”
• “It should be the unified ‘source of truth’ for all identity attributes of an individual that are known to the enterprise.”
• “It must be able to determine when identity information in different systems refers to the same individual despite lack of a common record identifier.”
• “A virtual directory uses caching and identifier-matching techniques to bring together at access-request time… identity information from multiple repositories, without ever instantiating all user identity information as a separate repository.”
• “Views of the data can be tailored to the needs of an SSO system or application, to serve just the data elements they need over a protocol they understand.”
• “CFS also lets an enterprise add 2-factor authentication to any application with no modification of the application required.”