Hello everyone,

Greetings from the Zoho Directory team!

2025 has been a highly successful year for Zoho Directory. We are delighted to introduce a fresh set of features, an enriched UI, and major product enhancements. These updates aim to deliver a smoother and more secure authentication process as well as enhance the user experience in the new Zoho Directory UI.

Below is an overview of the features now live, along with the latest security updates.

LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Instead of installing and maintaining the LDAP server, Zoho Directory gives you an online LDAP endpoint where your users, groups, and passwords are stored and authenticated from the cloud.

Zoho Directory's Cloud LDAP works with any application, server, and device that supports LDAP.

BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) is a security feature in Zoho Directory that allows organizations to use their own encryption key instead of Zoho's key Encryption key (KEK). BYOK gives your organization the flexibility to either integrate an external key manager (EKM) or manually upload an encrypted key. This key is used as the master encryption key to protect sensitive identity data stored inside Zoho Directory. With this feature, you have full control of the key that encrypts your identity data.

Zoho Directory's Cloud RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) enables secure access to your organization's Wi-Fi networks. It ensures that only authorized users can access these networks without the need for an on-premise RADIUS server. Users can access the organization's Wi-Fi network using the same credentials as their Zoho Directory account through RADIUS.

Audit logs help you to keep track of all the activities in your organization. It also enables you to detect unauthorized access or suspicious activity. You can inspect the in-depth information about a particular change, the data of the affected users, the date and time the changes occurred, and more.

Anomaly detection identifies unusual, risky, or suspicious activities in your organization and highlights them in the dashboard. By enabling Anomaly Detection, the system continuously monitors user activities, login patterns, device behavior, and admin actions. If something doesn't match the user's normal behavior, it flags it as an anomaly. You can also get an overall view of the security status with a detailed dashboard view.

Smart Groups in Zoho Directory is a condition-based user groups that automatically add users who meet certain conditions or criteria that is defined, so that admins don’t have to add them manually. Users are added to the group based on conditions like location, department, language, time zone, and more. You can define one or more conditions (smart rules), and when a user’s details match those conditions, they’re automatically added to the group.

With this release, we also bring you the option to delete users. You can now delete users from the organization when they leave the company, ensuring they no longer have access to the organizational resources. Depending on the user's roles and responsibilities, you may need to complete additional steps to remove the user from the organization, such as transferring owned data, reviewing directory-level app involvement, shifting department ownership, handling devices, and more.

The security policy framework has been revamped with more secure policies and additional user sign-in methods. The new policies are intended to enhance the complete sign-in process of your organization's users.

The policy structure has been redesigned as shown below:

With Conditional access policies, define how and when your users should be able to sign-in and access the organizational resources. When the policy is applied to users, the conditions are set for their sign-in process, along with the corresponding action that determines their access. If a user's sign-in meets the defined condition, they can access their account instantly or be allowed access after completing MFA. If the condition is not met, the user's sign-in attempt is denied.

Learn more about Conditional Access Policy.

The Routing policy defines how users of individual teams can sign in to their accounts. The members of the policy are required to sign in with the configured authentication method. It provides you with four versatile authentication modes for users to sign in, including password, passwordless, social sign-in, and IdPs.

The security policy comprises a password policy and session settings. You can enforce strong password rules, customize the user's password, and manage their sessions. With this policy, you can reduce the risk of password-related security breaches in your organization.

We hope you enjoy exploring Zoho Directory's new features and enhancements along with its refreshed UI. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to share them with us.

The Zoho Directory Team.