Azure & Active Directory Center

Years back, Active Directory (AD) was all the rage. I recall its release with Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and entire books were written on the subject, everything from design to deployment to continued maintenance. Over time, AD has lost its novelty as the shiny new toy, but it hasn’t lost its value as the foundation piece to all other aspects of your network and on-premises servers, like Exchange. That has held true even with its cloud-based cousin Azure AD. Nothing takes out the entire Microsoft 365 suite like an Azure AD outage because identity management and a host of other server necessities are tied back to it.

When a network issue leaves your domain controller stranded on an “island”

Your users know immediately when they lose their internet connection. Those “internet is down!” tickets start flowing. But what happens when the network segment hosting their domain controller (DC) is unreachable?

There are several benefits to hybrid identity and directory synchronization, including:

• Reducing the administrative programs in your organization
• Optionally enabling single sign-on scenario
• Synchronizing complex environments
• Flexibly enabling re-orgs, consolidations, and transformations

When you are planning any major IT transformation, we recommend that you do what the great craftsmen do: Measure twice. Cut once. That’s because we have seen it happen time and again. You spend all this effort creating a pristine plan and understanding the cool new features of the cloud platform you are migrating to. You market those features to your end users, to help show them how it will be a change for the better. And then the moment you start migrating, you run into issues. Now you have to stop the project and remediate these problems before you can keep going.

Getting ready for 'Day One' of a merger or acquisition is a unique challenge. There’s often a lot of complexity to think through—and not a lot of time to do it. So the top IT priority for Day One should be to set systems up so the organizations can start working together. In this post, we focus on setting up a unified directory.

Are you currently on AAD Connect 1.6.2.0? If so, you need to act now!

The rising need for flexibility and ease of integration with other systems, either on-premises or in the cloud, are driving organizations to adopt a simpler directory structure. Ideally, Active Directory architecture, design, management and operations should seamlessly be monitored and adjusted to keep up with the changes occurring in the larger enterprise. More often than not, however, instead of having in place an Active Directory monitoring strategy there only are periodic reviews that happens usually in response to certain events — some of business nature, some related to changes in technology or products, and some security related.

The key question often debated is whether Active Directory is owned by multiple teams, or by a stand-alone IT, security or directory team. And depending on who you ask within the organizations, you may get several different views. So how do you split the responsibility around Active Directory management?