Replication - Identity Store


Identity replication has been a complex and many times costly feature for customers to implement. Some customers mandate that all employees are entitled to gain access or safe harbor into any company common property area, even across the country or beyond. Others mandate the use of a single PACS card, while others demand a consolidated view of employee identity throughout the customer's domain.

To comply with such mandates, Security, HR, and IT must develop a comprehensive plan and PACS design that accommodates a unified identity store, which traditionally has been addressed by implementing a "master system server" (see Figure 3.) that integrates downstream to individual "local servers", and upstream to an HR database at the corporate or agency headquarters. This approach, while effective, adds a layer of additional costs for the master system server, associated IT hardware & computer SW licenses, and the proprietary PACS software that allows for the identity replication to occur.


Figure 3. Extra layer required for unified identity and replication with a typical PACS



PlaSec Appliances, through an innovative engineering design, utilize a directory structure to store data including identities. Many integration advantages stem from using directory to directory data collaboration (learn more under Products | Collaboration Platform). One valuable advantage is an inherent peer-peer replication capability, allowing PlaSec Appliances to automatically synchronize data with each other without the requirement of a "master system server". This highly efficient design is represented in Figure 4 below.


Figure 4. Enterprise Appliance Replication



Once a PlaSec Enterprise Appliance is setup for each location, replication of all the identity and configuration data from all sites is accomplished by simply by enabling replication in each appliance (see Figure 5.)

Figure 5. Replication Screenshot