Table of Content
- User account creation
- Account access management
- Password reset for multiple users
- Stale accounts cleanup
- Group membership management
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Active Directory (AD) is a crucial identity and access management component for many enterprises as it enables the creation, maintenance, and use of digital identities. The strength of your organization's security posture is directly proportional to how secure your AD infrastructure is. Since user accounts act as the basis of authentication and initial access to your network, ensuring that they are managed effectively optimizes IT operations and secures your AD infrastructure, reducing the risk of security breaches.
From the moment an employee is onboarded until they leave the organization, the IT administrator is responsible for managing the user's account. The IT admin has to create an AD user account, modify its properties when required, assign sufficient access rights, and delete the user account when the employee is off-boarded. Although all these activities are uncomplicated, using just the native AD tools to accomplish them is time-consuming and tedious.
IHere are five common AD user management pain points IT admins can overcome using ManageEngine ADManager Plus, a web-based AD management and reporting solution.
1. User account creation
Provisioning user accounts in bulk using native AD tools or Windows PowerShell scripts is irksome and grueling, as it requires in-depth scripting knowledge. Further, as IT admins have to often toggle between multiple consoles while provisioning access rights to new employees, there is plenty of room for error.
How does AD360 help? Harnessing CSV-based user provisioning techniques, AD360 simplifies bulk user provisioning for IT admins. For instance, if a group of employees sharing the same set of permissions need to be onboarded, the IT admin can create a user template by specifying the required permissions, then create a CSV file with the names of the employees. The IT admin then can simply import the CSV file, and apply the created template to enroll the users in bulk.
2. Account access management
Often, access permissions to resources for employees depends on their job title. Over time, these permissions might vary based on the project they are currently working on. Due to the overlap of access permissions between different job titles, it becomes challenging for IT admins to keep track of all the access permissions applicable to every user account. Users might have access permissions to top-level security groups or confidential data, which they don't need, for example. A best practice to employ is the principle of least privilege—providing only the minimum access required by an employee to accomplish a specific task. To reduce risks further, IT admins should be able to assign time-bound access to business-critical data. With time-bound access, a user is granted access based on their role, and the user is only allowed to complete tasks during the given period.
How does AD360 help? By using AD360's automated time-bound group permissions management feature, IT admins can assign users to specific groups and remove them automatically after a specified period. With the help of predefined NTFS reports, you can identify which user accounts have access to your organization's critical folders.
3. Password reset for multiple users
Say there have been signs of a few account compromise attempts. To prevent unauthorized access to data or resources on the site, the IT admin would need to reset all passwords immediately. However, IT admins do not have the option to reset multiple user passwords simultaneously in the native AD unless they use complex PowerShell scripts.
How does AD360 help? With AD360's built-in password reset feature, you can reset the passwords of multiple user accounts in just a few clicks. You can also generate a random password, type a new password, use the logon name as the password, or leave the password blank, forcing users to change their passwords immediately on their first logon.
4. Stale accounts cleanup
When employees leave your organization, their user accounts often remain in AD unnoticed. The passwords of these accounts remain unchanged, which can lead to potential account compromises. It gets worse if one of these accounts belonged to a privileged user. This is why it's crucial to identify inactive accounts and immediately purge them. However, the only way to ensure all inactive accounts are removed immediately is by automating the process. While native AD has provisions to track down and eliminate inactive user accounts, it can't remove them in bulk or automate the process.
How does AD360 help? AD360 enables you to effortlessly generate a list of all the inactive user accounts, the disabled user accounts, and the expired user accounts in the form of reports. From these reports, you can delete or disable these accounts in bulk instantly. If required, you can also move them to a separate organizational unit, quarantine them for a desired period of time, and then delete them eventually. Best of all, you can automate these tasks and specify how often you want this automation to run.
5. Group membership management
When employees are transferred from one department to another within their organization, the access privileges they had earlier often need to be revoked, and their group membership needs to be updated. This forces IT admins to again resort to using complex PowerShell scripts or native AD tools, which aren't very user-friendly. What you need is a GUI-based group membership management solution that lets you effortlessly manage the group membership of your users in bulk.
How does AD360 help? Using AD360, IT admins can manage the group membership of users with the help of automation and user modification templates. With these templates, IT admins can set up rules to automate the process of updating group memberships of users based on specific conditions. For example, the user will automatically be added to the group "Finance" if the user's title is "Accounts Manager." You can also update or manage the group membership for users in bulk by importing a CSV file containing the list of user accounts to be modified.