Chapter 25. Case Study: A Large Multinational Enterprise

• Overview of the Organization

• Directory Drivers

• Directory Service Design

• Directory Service Deployment

• Directory Service Maintenance

• Leveraging the Directory Service

• Summary and Lessons Learned

• Further Reading

• Looking Ahead

In this chapter we look at how a large multinational enterprise might design and deploy an LDAP directory service. Large organizations typically spend more time and money up front to design a directory service than small organizations do. The extra investment is necessary for several reasons:

• Large organizations tend to be more decentralized in terms of geography, political control, and information systems management. It is difficult to bring an organizationwide service like a central directory online because of all the physical, organizational, and political boundaries that separate the different parts of the organization.

• Data about important organizational assets (including people) is typically controlled by a group different from the one charged with deploying the directory service. This separation of control increases the amount of coordination required to obtain the data and deploy the directory.

• The complexity and cost of the components that make up the directory service are significant enough that a large investment in design and piloting is needed to ensure that the service smoothly enters its production phase.

• The cost of a design error is greater than in smaller deployments. Because of the large number of servers rolled out and the complexity of data maintenance and related issues, redesigning a large-scale directory late in the design process causes more pain and expense than redesigning a smaller deployment would.

The case study discussed in this chapter is fictional; it is not based directly on any real-world directory deployments. However, this case study draws from knowledge of several actual deployments with which we are familiar. The large, multinational enterprise we describe is patterned after a manufacturing company such as Ford Motor Company, Boeing, or Intel. The name of our fictitious company is HugeCo. This case study assumes that HugeCo's directory service has been deployed as a production service for approximately six months.