HDAP takes ID management to new heights

To many people search is still a technology geared to finding `stuff’ online, be that documents, stories in newspapers, or obscure restaurants in unknown cities. But it is increasingly being used for much wider purposes.

Take, for example, the security use it is being put to by Radiant Logic, a US-based provider of federated identity systems based on virtualisation. It has just announced the latest, Version 7.0, of its primary product, RadiantOne. This introduces  the use of HDAP, which the company says is the world’s first LDAP directory based on search technology and large cluster computing, and features an advanced identity integration layer based on virtualisation.

“Finally, there’s a robust security solution that’s built on a well-known model and also leverages the best of today’s technology”

HDAP allows enterprises to harness the power of large cluster and elastic computing to their identity infrastructure. Using this, organisations can deploy the much-needed `views’ of their identity infrastructure that their applications require, whether they’re located on-premises or in the cloud. With HDAP, those views are stored in a high-performance directory that is always up to date and scales dynamically based on demand.

According to the company, the combination of federation (security and single sign-on), the cloud, and an increasingly mobile workforce is putting escalating pressure on the enterprise identity system. To keep up with authentication and authorisation demands, while tapping into personalisation and recommendation engines, companies need a richer view of their identity. Organisations face two challenges: a fragmentation of the identity infrastructure across many different systems (for example, Active Directory, LDAP and databases), as well as a lack of flexibility and scalability using aging LDAP server technology.

“Our customers know RadiantOne virtualisation streamlines their identity and access infrastructures, reduces complexity, and speeds deployments,” said Dieter Schuller, Radiant Logic’s EVP of Business Development. “They’re taking advantage of RadiantOne to integrate more attributes from across their infrastructures, as well as publish diverse views of their identity data to meet the needs of applications.”

With this new HDAP innovation, Radiant Logic is marrying virtualisation and big data search technology with LDAP to open a new world of performance and possibility for identity and data management. Such storage can scale to millions of users on demand, while supporting smart search and analysis at a level that the company claims has previously been unreachable for the enterprise.

With RadiantOne, enterprises can add or remove servers/nodes at will, increasing or decreasing throughput as needed, meaning the system can be radically upgraded to handle high demand without stopping or slowing access. It is able to handle 120,000 queries per second on a 3-node cluster with 50 million users’ identities. And because the image is replicated across all nodes, load balancing allows the system to increase the aggregated throughput in a near-linear fashion.

“Speed and performance aren’t the only benefits, HDAP also leverages our virtualisation layer, serving as storage for a synchronisation powerhouse,” said Claude Samuelson, VP of Engineering at Radiant Logic. “By deploying a full LDAP directory on top of a cluster, the new RadiantOne offers extremely tight levels of replication between nodes, ensuring that the image of the enterprise’s entire identity infrastructure is always kept up to date across every node.”

The system can extract the contextual relationships between once-siloed information and represent that essential context using plain English, readable by both man and machine.

Traditionally, an LDAP engine was used to store and search all this information. But now, the directory at the heart of IdM is becoming a system to publish contextual information from enterprise applications, making it searchable in the same way that users search the Internet—by keyword.

The company sees that playing a role in the developing world of the Internet of Things (IoT), by combining search technology, context for structured data, and the evolution of LDAP. This it sees as changing the game for IdM, making the future of identity richer and more responsive to demand. In fact, it sees the combination of HDAP and context, this brings users, identity and security back to being the centre of data management.