Today's business philosophy is for companies to partner with others that offer complementary products and services, and to let their respective engineering teams work together to design products that mutually benefit each partner's customers. Nowhere is this more important than the interface between the network and the network operating system. The third element that rounds off the collaboration is in the implementation of standards-based security to allow virtual private networking and secure computing across the Internet. Directory Services A Directory Service allows any server, application or user on an enterprise network to locate and identify any service available on the network. This may be another user, a printer, an application server, or a data tunnel with a defined QoS level.
Directory services are the cornerstone for creating intelligent networks.
A directory service is a physically distributed, logically centralized repository of infrequently changing data, which consists of users, resources, and policy profiles for the entire enterprise networking environment. A traditional directory service provides a means for locating and identifying users and available resources in a distributed system. Directory services also provide the foundation for adding, modifying, removing, renaming, and managing system components without disrupting the services provided by other system components. The focus is on providing management of the network as a system, not a set of disparate components. Vendors have adopted de facto and open industry standards to tie these services into its enterprise management systems.