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User Profile Storage

Use Redis Enterprise to quickly authenticate and identify users

When a user logs into an application, an application can create a user profile to store information to identify the individual throughout the user session and for other purposes such as personalization.

Responsive access to user profiles is critical to provide fast authentication and seamless user experiences. Using Redis Enterprise enables real-time retrieval of user profiles, and offers the resilience needed to protect against a single point of failure in application architectures. Redis Enterprise also provides out-of-the-box support for JSON documents, a data format commonly used  for user profiles. 

How user profile stores work for a mobile banking application

  1. User profiles may be aggregated from data spanning multiple databases, each supporting its own product line, and prefetched into Redis Enterprise.
  2. The application uses a prefetched user profiles during the authentication process to validate users.
  3. During the session, the application refers to the user profile stored in Redis Enterprise to identify user characteristics, such as whether they have permissions to access a mobile banking feature. 

How Redis Enterprise solves your challenges

The problemThe Redis Enterprise solution
The application is too slow. Inadequate response times when retrieving user profile data leads to unresponsive user sessions or sluggish login and authentication processes.blue check icon Redis Enterprise promises real-time speed, with seemingly-instant responses for data retrieval.
Downtime or poor performance during peak activity periods, when the system cannot retrieve user profiles fast enough.blue check icon Redis Enterprise is highly scalable. It maintains sub-millisecond latency at high volumes to provide applications with quick access to user profiles even during periods of intense demand.
Users cannot log into the system, resulting in application downtime, because the user profile store fails.blue check icon Redis Enterprise is highly resilient, with 99.999% uptime. It ensures that user profiles are always available to the application when needed.

Why to use Redis Enterprise for user profile storage

  • Your applications can be responsive, with instantaneous authentication and user profile creation during login and throughout the user sessions, regardless of system demand
  • Avoid application outages due to inaccessible user profiles
  • Ability to build personalized offers served in the application in real-time
  • Support for multiple data types including JSON

FAQs

  • What is a user profile store?
    • Applications keep information in a user profile store, and access those documents throughout a given session. A user profile contains uniquely identifying information such as user id, email address, password, roles, and permission to validate access. In some cases, user profiles include purchase history, wish list items, demographic data, and other historical data. 
  • Where should user profiles be stored?
    • User profiles can be created and stored in a relational database. But relational databases cannot efficiently scale to handle workload spikes. Some applications have periods when millions of users connect to the system concurrently, and historically relational databases cannot keep up with the authentication process.  To promote speed and scalability, user profiles should be stored in an in-memory datastore such as Redis Enterprise. 
  • What are some best practices for user profile storage?
    • You can take advantage of user profiles for more than identifying users. They can be used for personalization by analyzing wish list items, demographics, and recent purchases. The search and query capabilities in Redis Enterprise allows businesses to index JSON documents and make specific attributes, such as a user’s email or wish list items, searchable for analysis.