In an effort to stay relevant in the interconnected global economy, organizations and entities have accelerated the move to cloud technologies. In migrating to the now ubiquitous cloud, there emerges a central need for a secure user identity repository. IBM Security Verify provides smart identity for the hybrid multi-cloud world and Cloud Directory is at the heart of it.

Unifying Identity Management

Cloud Directory, simply put, is a repository for users and groups. Cloud Directory is home to two types of users; regular and federated. Regular users are native cloud directory users and are maintained within the repository.

Federated users are associated with existing identity sources such as LDAP, Active Directory, Social, or other third-party directories. These users are maintained with the original identity source. For example, the password for federated users is not maintained in the Cloud Directory repository. This enables the organization to allow access to various contractors, business partners.

This allows for all-encompassing scenarios that require businesses to build a hybrid unified access approach with both their on-premise (or proprietary) repositories and cloud-based repositories with a single source of truth in Cloud Directory. This greatly simplifies the need for administrators to manage various identities in the organization. Cloud Directory allows you to be flexible in the gradual journey from on-prem to the cloud.

Open standards

Cloud directory implements the SCIM specification (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) that is designed to make managing user identities in cloud-based applications and services easier. This open API specification is also extensible and allows the configuration of attributes/schema that are unique to the organization's requirements.

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Anil Levi, IBM Security