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Active Directory Management

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The importance of Active Directory cannot be overestimated. It holds its strong positions for a decade already and its future is still very promising. It's a known network monster whose range of capabilities expands year after year. To keep up with Active Directory fulfilling its whole potential is rather challenging task that requires much efforts. Active Directory management has become the task for professional skilled staff. But if those guys are trained, it does not mean that it's so easy for them to work without stress, as Active Directory management is a tremendous challenge.

Among all tasks that administrators face daily there are some that cannot be fulfilled by native Active Directory management tools. Among them are: Active Directory delegation, Active Directory automation, cross-domain management, web-based administration, audit of changes, etc.

Let's discuss them in brief:

Delegation of rights in Active Directory is a possibility to decentralize Active Directory management providing administrative rights to non-administrative staff. But there are too many points to review to keep Active Directory integral and secure. Native Active Directory management tools do not provide capabilities to control delegated tasks and require much manual and thus error-prone activity. Consistent Active Directory management solutions provide the possibility to delegate administrative tasks using role-based access control model that already proved its easiness and efficiency. Moreover, when such a solution includes web interface, it is possible to cope with all AD management tasks using a web browser.

Active Directory automation is vital when managing large networks. Just imagine how hard it is to manually create hundreds or even thousands of user accounts with proper attributes, configure AD groups, etc. Much time is wasted for correcting errors due to manual activity. It is double and ungrateful work. Third party solutions are able to automate Active Directory management greatly by providing user provisioning and deprovisioning capabilities, automated management of groups and maintenance of OUs structure.

A large network refers to storing data as complex hierarchical structure with many forests containing lots of domains that can belong to different geographic locations. And it is another challenge while Active Directory management – some objects may be distributed across different domains, belonging to different geographic locations, but though require single administration that can be fulfilled in one operation. This challenge can be met by third party solutions that support cross-domain management functionality.

When somebody has access to sensitive data a threat of security breach inevitably rises involving the necessity to constantly track who modified certain data. Moreover, it is very useful to track one's own activity while managing Active Directory. Active Directory logs and reports creation are features that should be included in Active Directory management solution. Efficient Active Directory audit is impossible without these features.

Times when Active Directory management could be accomplished by means of several easy operations are gone. Everyday Active Directory management tasks take more and more time and efforts that greatly reduces work effectiveness of IT department. Consistent Active Directory management solution is a must for running large and complex networks. Such software helps perform all challenging tasks using a single interface, simplifies if not automates most of them.
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