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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
