Employee System of Record

View and manage user data from Workday, Active Directory, LDAP, Google Apps, and on-prem directories—all in one place

The challenge

Making sense of segmented data

An employee system of record (ESR) is a repository that stores employee information, such as name, role, address, email, password, and so on.

In the past, on-premises directory services such as LDAP and AD have been the predominant ESR solutions. But the ascendancy of cloud and mobile technology has challenged on-prem systems. User information often exists in multiple sources. There’s no central view of users, so it’s difficult to keep the information consistent. Even more, data formats differ across sources, making it difficult to synchronise from one source to another. When it comes time to manage access and authentication, the fragmentation can bring your systems—and your people—to a standstill.

Okta solves the ESR crisis by aggregating rich user data, standardising it, and pushing it to applications.

The solution

Okta IT products

Universal Directory

User identities live in a lot of different places. With Okta's Universal Directory, you can create a centralised view of all your users, wherever they're sourced. It'll make access management more straightforward and secure and give users a consistent experience across your products.

Features

  • Build a single repository for user identity information
  • Store profiles, manage passwords, and apply access policies
  • Create a consistent UX across every part of your app
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Lifecycle Management

Automate user onboarding and offboarding with seamless communication between directories and cloud applications.

Features

  • Automated user import
  • Automated deprovisioning
  • Rule engine
  • Bi-directional user management integrations
  • On-prem provisioning
  • Just-in-time provisioning
  • Deep integrations
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Whitepaper

Active Directory integration architecture overview

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Unify your on-prem directory

Universal Directory centralises identities across dispersed user stores. It can federate identities with AD and work as a connector between AD and applications. A lightweight agent imports profiles to UD from multiple directories and across multiple domains.

  • Get an up-to-date, centralised view of users with consistent data formatting
  • Easily integrate with AD across multiple domains
  • Pave the way for a transition to cloud—simply unplug from AD and connect Universal Directory to other cloud services
Use a cloud directory as your source of truth

If you’re using on-prem directories and a cloud service, it’s easy for important identity information to become lost or conflicted.

One system might hold a user’s latest name and address information, while a separate directory holds the latest email address. When this data exists in different formats (e.g. LastName, FirstName vs. FirstName_LastName), it’s very difficult to reconcile.

Okta solves the issue by mastering attributes from all your user stores. You simply build the mappings and import the profiles. The system standardises the data for you.

Go off-prem

Plenty of companies use pure-cloud infrastructure to store their user identities. But the fragmentation makes the data difficult to manage. In this case, you can pipe user information from various stores into Universal Directory. Okta then serves as the ESR to facilitate authentication into other SaaS apps. With live synchronisation, you can be sure that all your user data is up to date.