When we talk about consolidating Active Directory groups, we refer to the process of cleaning up the clutter of groups accumulated over the years, so that only the relevant groups exist in the directory. Consolidating Active Directory groups is one of the most daunting tasks that IT administrators must undertake. Poor cleanup procedures can expose…
Who’s in charge here, anyway? Even if you have only a modicum of proper group management in place, your groups should at very least have some documentation of (a) how a given group is being used in the Notes field and (b) who is responsible for the group in the Managed By field, for the…
If you’re like most IT professionals, you don’t bother to update an Active Directory group’s membership. What’s the big deal? You may have read our articles about the realities of IT not focusing on groups or about the importance of putting some basic management in place — or better yet, a full group management lifecycle…
According to the 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, approximately 85% of data breaches are performed by an external threat actor, with approximately 45% of those breaches focusing on credentials. This makes sense. Without proper credentials, the threat actor won’t be able to access the target data they want. Most threat actors gain entry by…
When’s the last time you actually managed your Active Directory groups? Be honest. We’re not talking about that last time you added someone to a group. We’re talking about the last time you actually did some homework to ensure that the group had the right members, that the permissions were assigned correctly, etc. It’s probably…
Group management in Active Directory is so much more than just making sure that memberships are correct. There’s an entire lifecycle process devoted to improving the management of groups — and the security they represent. But for many of you, there simply isn’t enough time (yet) to devote to implementing an entire group lifecycle. So,…