LDAP — Benefits and Drawbacks

Fox Pass
2 min readJul 15, 2021

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a security system that protects your data by ensuring that the information collected from other servers is safe through emailing.

In simple language, one can also define LDAP as a communication medium of Active Directory and other directory services.

Just like any other security system, LDAP also has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. Let’s have a look at them.

LDAP is security software that permits the users and applications to access, verify and find every sort of information required in an organization.

LDAP’s main aim is to connect the organization users with clients, which makes it safe to share the data from both the server and client end to use and access.

LDAP is a vendor-neutral application protocol that functions to maintain the info in a directory in an organized way, which means it allows you to keep a guide and store information about its items.

BENEFITS

Some of the benefits of using LDAP are -

1. Open Source: You don’t need to pay anything to download the most popular implementation of LDAP.

2. Standardized: LDAP is standardized and ratified as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1997

3. Flexible: It is convenient and easy to work on. Developers and IT admins use LDAP for a lot of reasons and situations.

Because LDAP is used in so many different ways, there is a community surrounding the protocol that helps people get the most out.

DRAWBACKS

Disadvantages of using LDAP are as follows -

1. Age: LDAP is quite an old network system to use.

2. On-Prem: LDAP is usually set up on-prem with an open LDAP server, and it is not an easy undertaking.

For the organizations which are moving to the cloud, on-prem is not exactly an ideal choice.

3. Expertise: LDAP setup and maintenance can only be done by an expert. People who are this knowledgeable are challenging to find and expensive.

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Fox Pass

Foxpass company provide the best and highly configurable data security system to the big organizations.