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Access Controls Leveraging Active Directory Groups

I admit to being a big fan of Centrify so I was especially pleased to find this “chalktalk” they were giving on the same day that I was researching Group Based Access Control (GBAC).  The premise of my research was that Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is too limiting, trying to fit a square user into…

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Healthcare Challenges: Managing Directories With Less Resources

We all know that the economy has cut IT staffing to the bone.  While there seems to be some rebounding from the lows of last year, organizations are still running very lean. Healthcare IT organizations are in a particularly difficult place.  At the same time that their IT staff has been cut to meet shrinking budgets…

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Automated Provisioning Machine for Active Directory

In many organizations, Active Directory provisioning consists of a series of manual processes and emails and help desk calls that ultimately finish with an employee having a network login and hopefully an Exchange email account.  It is ripe with potential for errors and just not a good use of limited resources. But then the problem…

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Active Directory Token Bloat & Group Glut

One of the tricks of Active Directory management is the fine balance between usability for end users and performance.  A great example of this is the usability of security groups.  Active Directory security groups are an excellent tool for granting access to network resources.  You could be tempted to load up a user with security…

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Security Groups in SharePoint – Managing Access Dynamically

SharePoint is becoming ever more popular, especially with the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010.  SharePoint is an excellent tool for communication but we’re getting more and more questions about how to use Active Directory’s group structure to manage access.  Large enterprises with thousands of users need a simpler way to manage SharePoint access. Some tips…

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Managing Active Directory … Painful and Boring

In a recent survey, we found that managing groups in Active Directory is painful or very painful for 25% of respondents and only 6% found it to be no problem at all.  It’s pretty obvious why this is considered painful, 81% of all organizations have a manual process for managing Active Directory groups. And despite…

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Group Centric Identity Management

Identity management has been defined by wikipedia (great source, I know, but bear with me) as: Identity management … is a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system (such as a country, a network or an organization) and controlling the access to the resources in that system by placing restrictions on the…