* Delivering services worldwide over the Internet means dealing with different regulatory requirements for customer privacy in different countries.
In a recent look at what we were talking about 10 years ago, the issue of having your identity data distributed, replicated and partitioned came up. It’s even more important now than it was back then because of concerns that weren’t evident at the turn of the century. One vendor recently released a white paper emphasizing this new concern which says, in part:
“Data replication needs can become complex when you have a global infrastructure. For example, delivering services to customers worldwide via the Internet means facing different regulatory requirements for customer privacy in different countries. So a directory services solution must have the flexibility to replicate in each country only the data that’s needed by a particular application, rather than the complete dataset that directory services solutions have traditionally delivered.
The point is that data replication in a customer-centric environment has to go far beyond robust replication to support efficient data sharing that meets all the requirements and circumstances of a diverse, Internet-based service environment. Providing robust data replication to support high directory availability through data redundancy and failover capabilities is desirable, of course. But it’s not enough.”
It’s not just multinationals, though that should look at what is being replicated according to the paper from UnboundID:
“There’s a similar principle at work for any organization in which certain applications require more data than others — for example, a company whose Web department uses Web applications that other departments don’t. Traditionally, a directory services solution will deliver the extra data uniformly across all applications, even those that don’t need it. What’s needed instead is a way to replicate data just to the dedicated applications that require it. This protects quality of service by protecting server performance.”
The paper (called “The Power to Put Customers First: Making the Case for a Customer-Centric Infrastructure”) goes on to talk about “Synchronization of data between multiple repositories” and “Protection for growing amounts of sensitive data” — issues we had a dozen years ago, but issues that have changed over time so that new solutions are needed.
You should get a copy of the paper (you will need to register, though) available here to see, if nothing else, what’s new in directory technology. You’ll want to examine your own infrastructure again in light of the paper’s conclusions. Maybe you need to replace large parts of your infrastructure or perhaps you only need to tweak it, but you will want to implement some changes, I’m sure.
