The survey asked questions about the downtime an average user experienced from these activities, along with the fully-bur dened hourly salary rates of the user base and an estimate of the loss in business associated with an hour of system downtime. By allowing central management of all desktops and servers, NDS cuts system downtime significantly. NDS further reduces downtime by switching users to a mirrored server when the main one fails, with minimal impact on IT administrators. As organizations embrace ecommerce, directories are likely to become even more indispensable. By giving each user a digital persona that can be reliably authenticated, for instance, directories provide the trusted relationships needed for ecommerce.
Directories also make it easier to integrate ecommerce sites with back office systems.
Further, with their scalability, directories allow organizations to accommodate rapid ecommerce growth more readily and to expand beyond the corporate network to include partners, suppliers, and third-party providers in their transactions. To get an accurate measure of the investment in deploying NDS, the survey asked for the setup, upgrade, and replacement costs for NDS, in addition to the purchase price. Training and maintenance costs were also included in the total investment figure. All rights reserved.