Most IT departments have no issue admitting the high importance of a highly available Active Directory. It’s become clear that while Active Directory downtime is rare when it does happen, it’s devastatingly costly. Most modern enterprises live and die by their identity infrastructure, and Active Directory is primarily at the…
I addressed Active Directory excessive privilege in the past as part of other, broader topics. But recently I started thinking it’s a great time to dedicate an entire article to it. This is not a random thought on my part. All you need to do is look at a few…
One of the really annoying things about passwords is that you have to remember them. If you can't remember your password at a SaaS provider, it's pretty straightforward: you click on the "forgot password" link and go through the password recovery process. As is often the case, however, the corporate…
It's pretty well accepted now that the world is moving away from painstakingly planned, piloted, deployed, and maintained on-premises applications in local data centers. It's moving to web services, hosted in the cloud (best definition: your stuff on someone else's computer) whose new capabilities are rapidly deployed and refined via…
And in the case of passwords, each one - especially each forgotten one - is a little security risk scurrying around in the shadows. You may think you have gotten rid of them (or at least reduced them to a manageable amount), but they still keep popping up. And as…
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…
Microsoft continues to work on a sore spot in its hybrid identity strategy: The challenge of deploying its identity bridge between Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) on premises and Azure Active Directory in the cloud. This bridge consists of AD FS for federation and a succession of utilities, culminating…
With all the talk about stampeding to the cloud, I get asked fairly regularly if I think Active Directory will be going away. No, AD isn't becoming obsolete; it's evolving. And as it evolves, I'd argue that it matters more than ever. Within Microsoft ISSD (Identity and Security Services Division),…