Here at Zoho Directory, we've been hard at work to make managing your workforce identity simpler, smarter, and stronger, all entailed in a refreshing new UI.
This year, the newly upgraded Zoho Directory 2.0 offers authentication not only for your apps and devices but also provides simplified and secure Wifi authentication. This newer version also comes with a smarter way to group your employees and make your everyday user management easier.
Organizational security has been a priority offering of Zoho Directory ever since the beginning. This time, our upgraded security controls now include conditional access policies for tailored access permissions, detailed audit logs for better visibility and compliance, and anomaly detection to spot suspicious activity before it becomes a threat.
But Zoho Directory 2.0 is more than just an update. These newer features and newly refreshed UI is everything you need to better manage your workforce identity.
Here's a quick walkthrough.
Cloud RADIUS
At home, connecting to WiFi is simple. Enter a shared password once, and you're good to go.
But in an organization, that approach quickly falls short. Sharing a single password across teams and devices creates security risks and makes it hard to manage who’s actually on the network.
That’s where Zoho Directory's RADIUS WiFi authentication makes a difference.
Zoho Directory's cloud RADIUS links network access to individual user identities in your organization. Cloud RADIUS ensures that only authorized users can connect to your organization's wifi networks. You can streamline the wifi login process and reduce IT overhead because there’s no need to maintain physical servers, enhancing security with centralized WiFi authentication in your organization.
Smart Groups
Where there are more employees, user management activities like assigning their apps, managing their access, and applying other policies happen in bulk rather than individually.
This is where Zoho Directory's Smart Groups play a role.
Zoho Directory provides you with ways to group users so you can perform user management to several people at once. With the newer Smart Groups, group creation is made smarter because you'll be able to automate how your employees should be grouped based on predefined conditions you set.
A few of these conditions include the users' email, time zone, country, designation, language, and more. Using these conditions, Smart Groups lets you stack one condition over the other to create complex grouping rules. These rules dictate which members in your organization will be grouped automatically, and they can be used to assign access permissions or even security policies.
Conditional Access Policies
Zoho Directory's latest additions bring in a new way to authenticate your employees without slowing down their productivity.
Security risks are only growing, and traditional, one-size-fits-all methods don't cut it anymore. Organizations need a more dynamic way of authentication that evaluates the nature of login attempts to provide an appropriate level of security.
This is where Zoho Directory's conditional access policy helps.
This policy lets you evaluate your employees' login attempts based on the conditions that you set. These conditions include location, time and day of login, IP address, device, and the platform being used. If the conditions match, the user is allowed access; if not, access can be denied or allowed only after subjecting them through MFA.
The conditional access policy gives you the flexibility to respond intelligently to evolving threats, user behavior, and compliance requirements without burdening legitimate users.
Routing Policy
The way your employees log into their work accounts plays a huge role in your organization's security.
This is because not all authentication methods are created equal. We have passwords, but we also have passwordless methods. Organizations also use other methods like social logins and other custom IDPs. To make authentication work for you, you need a way to set the first-factor authentication methods in your organization based on the needs of your teams and roles and their requirements.
Zoho Directory's Routing policy can help you do that. This policy lets you mandate the authentication methods such as password, passwordless, social logins, and custom IDPs for your entire organization while also allowing you to customize it for your individual teams based on their needs.
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)
In the current cloud age, where businesses are being entrusted with so much sensitive customer data, customers are looking for ways to keep better control over their data security and confidentiality.
And the best way to them provide them with that control is with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK).
Businesses usually secure customer data with the help of encryption. This security technique is a proven way for data protection with encryption keys. While Zoho will encrypt customer data with the utmost care with the new BYOK, customers will now be able to provide the encryption key (KEK) of their choice, giving them more control over their data security.
Cloud LDAP
As businesses move to the cloud, IT teams are often held back by one stubborn piece of infrastructure: the physical LDAP server. With Zoho Directory’s new Cloud LDAP capability, that challenge is finally removed.
Cloud LDAP brings secure LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication to the cloud. It allows you to connect and authenticate your LDAP-based applications, printers, Wi-Fi networks, and other endpoints without maintaining on-premise servers.
By managing authentication with Zoho Directory, organizations can now gain access control for their cloud resources as well as on-prem apps like Atlassian Jira, Apache Directory Studio, CloudBees Core, Jenkins, and more, all from within Zoho Directory.
Audit Logs
Audit logs in Zoho Directory provide you with log entries of all admin operations performed in your organization. They play an important role in your business' security and compliance posture.
Audit logs help you continuously monitor and record all critical admin actions performed, including access changes, permission changes, and other policy updates. By capturing who did what, when, and from where, audit logs offer detailed history and traceability that help detect suspicious behavior, investigate incidents, and prove compliance during audits like GDPR, ISO, and SOC.
Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection in Zoho Directory helps you keep an eye on unusual or suspicious user activity within your organization. It supports IT admins by highlighting risks related to incorrect identity settings, misuse of access permissions, and actions that don’t follow company policies.
For example, if an employee who usually logs in from India suddenly tries to access their account from the U.S., the system will flag this as an anomaly. The IT team can then review the alert and verify if it's a real issue. Anomaly detection also watches for other unusual actions, like password resets, MFA changes, role updates, or changes to conditional access policies. If any of these operations deviate from normal behavior, they’ll be flagged, too.
All of these alerts are organized in a clear and easy-to-read dashboard, along with specific reasons for each anomaly. This helps the IT team quickly understand what happened and take the right action, improving the security posture of the organization.
Wrapping up
With that, we've wrapped up all of the updates in Zoho Directory 2.0, we hope the new Zoho Directory experience will make managing your workforce identity simpler, smarter, and more secure.
Ready to experience Zoho Directory 2.0? Try booking a free demo today.
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