The Identity Directory Services makes use of the policies and standards that helps support enterprise security and provides an assurance to the users that the identity information is secured and managed appropriately by the parties to whom it has been entrusted.

Organizations need to maintain control and integrity of sensitive personal information about their customers, employees, and partners. Data related to social security numbers, credit card numbers, medical history and more are increasingly under scrutiny by regulations seeking to prevent abuse or theft of such information. Privacy conscious organizations frequently have reacted to these requirements by enforcing overly strict controls and processes that hinder business operations and impact productivity, flexibility, and efficiency. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some organizations do not take the care needed to safeguard this information, potentially putting identity-related data at risk without sufficient oversight and control. The Identity Directory Services enables a standards-based mechanism for enterprises to establish "contracts" between their applications so that identity related information can be shared securely and with confidence that this data will not be abused, compromised, or misplaced. Using this framework, organizations have complete visibility into how identity information is stored, used, and propagated throughout their business. This enables organizations to automate controls to streamline business processes without fear of compromising the confidentiality of sensitive identity related information.

The Identity Directory Services is an agreed-upon process for specifying how identity-related data is treated when writing applications. This provides developers a standard approach to write applications that use this data so that governing policies can be used to control it. This results in faster development of privacy aware applications.

IDS enables the decoupling of identity-aware applications from a specific deployment infrastructure. Specifically, using IDS enables developers to defer deciding how identity related information will be stored and accessed by their application. Developers do not need to worry about whether they should use a SQL database, an LDAP directory, or other system. In the past, developers were forced to write highly specific code, driving technology and vendor lock-in.

For example, the Identity Directory API provides methods for accessing and managing identity information in a directory server that is the domain identity store. Entity definitions, entity relationships, and the physical identity store details can be configured using either the Identity Directory Configuration APIs or Mbeans. The Identity Directory API is used to initialize the Identity Directory Service. The Identity Directory Service provides an interface to both access and modify users and group information from different identity stores. See Using the Identity Directory API.