Microsoft recently announced the public preview of two major new capabilities that will make integrating your on-premises Active Directory to Azure AD much, much easier. Passthrough authentication (PTA) and Seamless Single Sign-On (I'm choosing to call it 3SO) will allow your users to easily access Azure AD applications such as…
On the heels of Microsoft's updated password recommendations, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has come out with its own updated password guidelines. These recommendations parallel many of Microsoft's recommendations and thus give them extra credibility; in some areas they go further. When two major security industry influencers…
Now that businesses are adopting cloud computing as part of their business model, a large percentage are choosing to connect their on-premises Active Directory environment to its counterpart in the cloud, Microsoft's Azure Active Directory. When you extend your on-premises AD to Azure AD, you have two choices for how…
Active Directory is a very robust application, as it should be for such a fundamental building block of a company's IT infrastructure. But the architecture that makes it robust also makes it hard to understand. This lack of understanding often leads to assumptions in your recovery strategy that can leave…
Back in 2012, I wrote about a nifty tool known as the Active Directory Replication Status Monitor (inevitably shortened to ADREPLSTATUS for efficiency's sake) and how it was the first Microsoft tool produced in years to make monitoring Active Directory easier. Then recently Microsoft sort of took it away. Then,…
Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) has grown to be a marvelously reliable, highly scalable, and fault tolerant core component of your company’s IT infrastructure. It generally works quite well without requiring a lot of attention. But the AD DS admin must put in extra work to take the service…
If you want to make an Active Directory administrator uncomfortable, ask them about their recovery plan. When you ask this question, many AD admins will instead tell you about their object recovery plan. Some will describe their domain controller recovery procedures. But if you press further to ask if they've…
Recently, Microsoft has released a security update (MS14-068) for Windows Server. The patched vulnerability is in the Windows Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC), which generates the session tickets to identities within Active Directory while accessing the Domain's resources. When clients request access to a resource, they contact the ticket-granting service…