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LDAP is a protocol that forms the basis for different directory services and access management solutions. What is the difference between Active Directory and LDAP? If the HR manager wants to access an employee’s record for changing the salary details, the authorization and access are made easier using LDAP. Using LDAP, the HR manager can be delegated control to the HR tree, and the other trees can be given control to the respective department managers. For instance, employees in an organization can be categorized based on their departments such as marketing, sales, HR, or more. Using LDAP, all the employee information can be stored and organized in a directory for easier access. An organization can also use LDAP for directory services authentication.įor an organization that operates in different parts of the world, there are hundreds of divisions based on business roles and thousands of employees. Apart from storing information, a directory service also provides authentication and authorization services for users. It can be used in a large organization consisting of thousands of employees, for storing and maintaining information about the employees and resources.
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Storage and retrieval of data, authentication of clients, and searching for specific data are some of the services provided by a directory service. An LDAP directory can be used to store and access various types of information such as images, text, and binary information. LDAP defines a message protocol that is used by directory clients and servers. Each person is represented using an entry and their contact information is represented using key-value pairs. A telephone directory or phone book is one of the most common examples that can be used for explaining a directory. Hence, directories are optimized to respond to high-volume search operations or read requests. This is one of the most important characteristics that set directories apart from relational databases. The information in a directory is read more often than they are written or updated. A directory is a hierarchical database that is used to store and organize information about objects. To understand the services provided by LDAP, it is necessary to understand what a directory is. LDAP has become popular owing to the fact that it is a lightweight, open, and cross-platform protocol. LDAP was hence developed as a lightweight alternative, as it could use the much simpler TCP/IP stack while simplifying and removing some complicated X.500 operations and features. It could not use the TCP/IP protocol stack. X.500 was complicated, and it relied on the OSI protocol stack. The term “lightweight” is used in comparison with X.500, which was the previous standard for directory services.
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In other words, LDAP is used to store, update and retrieve data from a directory structure.
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The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, commonly known as LDAP, is a communication protocol that is used to access directory servers.
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