While there hasn’t been much news around directory services in the last decade, we see new momentum in this area, driven by two challenges and both related to the “hyberconnected” enterprise that has to manage identities of consumer, things, devices etc. and their relationships.
One challenge is performance. Managing some thousand employees or even tens of thousands or a few hundred thousand is fairly different from managing tens of millions of customers, billions of things, or all the related devices. There have been some large deployments particularly in the consumer space, but right now this is moving from a specialized use case in few industries towards a standardized requirement of virtually any industry. Vendors propose various answers to that challenge. HDAP (Hadoop + LDAP), Cloud Directory Services, or just larger deployments of their COTS products. But what does it really need?
The other challenge are data models. LDAP, being derived from X.500 DAP, has its roots in phone directories. It has a rather inflexible data model. When looking at the broad variety of identities to manage, beyond humans, and theire complex relationships, the question arises whether the LDAP data model is good enough for the future. Some vendors already decided against LDAP as the core of their directory data model. But what does it really need?
In this panel, both the challenge of performance and of data models will be discussed in depth. Is LDAP still the future or do we need something different? Will there be new REST-based standards or will we end up with proprietary approaches?
