Steven ZahmApologies for the tardy reply! I missed this in my support queue.
You have two option. The first one is the method I recommend. There is a feature that you can enable to require a user to login before viewing the directory. The second option is to use the WordPress feature to password protect that page that you insert the [connections] shortcode on. This is useful if you want only a single password to distribute. However, if the person knows Connections very well, they could work around this to view specific entries. If you chose this method instead of creating users, probably not much of an issue because distributing a single password isn’t all that secure either.
You can use the CSV Import extension to bulk import your data to build the initial directory. You can use the Link extension to allow your users the ability to maintain their own data.
Hope that helps.