The disadvantages of using Directory Services are the costs associated initially for creating and keeping them current, the need to have a staff of engineering and software experts on-hand to add functionality to the system as needed, and the complexity of integration across different Directory Services architectures at the operating system level. Directory Services can be extremely complex and when used for role-based access within enterprises, can lock employees out of their own files and systems and the ones they need to use for their jobs as well if only a slight variation is made in the security levels of the users. There is also the downside risk of technology obsolescence as many companies will standardize on a vendors' specific version fo Directory Services, only to find their company moving in an entirely different direction over time. The risk of incompatibility to other systems from suppliers, partners, and buyer or customers' systems is also significant. This is especially the case in enterprise systems that often rely on hundreds of namespaces on the same network, and the coordination of application instances across each one (Chen, Chen, Maa, 2002). Finally the complexities of licensing across Directory Services implementations can be very expensive and also very complex, especially for Microsoft Active directory Services (Pleas, 1999).
What disaster recovery options are available for Directory Services?
The basic nature of a Directory Service is to replicate content and files to ensure fault tolerance and redundancy over time. The use of namespaces for fault tolerance has also been incorporated into specific variations of the UNIX operating system (Thibodaux, 2005). Directory Services vary in their approach to backing system...
The use of Active Directory Services for managing re-connection to network resources through X.500 protocols is now commonplace and often completed using Web Services to initiate and maintain connections over time (O'Mahony, Weldon, 1995). Finally, certain vendors' Directory Services includes security and authentication role-based access so that only those with security clearances can gain access to data.
References
Bernstein, Philip a. (1996). Middleware: A model for distributed system services. Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM, 39(2), 86.
Ruey-Shun Chen, CC Chen, & Shine-Ching Maa. (2002). An integration of directory services in enterprise. International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 15(1-3), 51-59.
O Mahony, Donal, & Weldon, Neil. (1995). X.500 directory services support for electronic data interchange (EDI). Computer Networks & ISDN Systems, 27(5), 691.
Keith Pleas. (1999, December). Communicating with Active Directory. PC Magazine, 18(21), 265-267.
Rednic, E., & Toma, a.. (2009). Multimedia Flavor in Directory Services Environment. Informatica Economica, 13(3), 59-66.
Patrick Thibodeau. (2005, March). Virtualization…
