In the world of identity and access management (IAM), Active Directory has become unavoidable and absolutely necessary for on-premises user authentication and authorization. Now, mix in the cloud—Exchange Online, Office 365, Skype for Business, Google Workspace—and your management strategy just got complicated. If not implemented and managed properly, the tools you use to manage your hybrid environment can cause headaches or worse for your AD administrators and users.
The vast majority of organizations maintain on-premises AD while expanding to the cloud. This hybrid AD environment can be challenging to manage with native tools or manual processes. ManageEngine ADManager Plus is the ideal solution to mitigate the challenges of hybrid environments; it's also effective for closing security holes, reducing risk, and above all, driving consistency and efficiency.
On this page, we'll address five challenges that most organizations must overcome as they attempt to navigate the turbulent hybrid environment
It’s no secret that the native AD tools, which are supposed to help manage identities and access, have limited capabilities. To execute the same action, such as provisioning a user, in AD and Office 365 requires the use of separate tools with entirely unrelated interfaces. Therefore, an already cumbersome task for on-premises AD becomes twice as challenging when it must be carried out for other platforms like Office 365. Even with earnest efforts to use the native Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) tool, most organizations choose to adopt a third-party tool to streamline and automate AD management tasks.
The ideal solution to the multiple tool challenge would be to resort to a single tool that overcomes the shortcomings of native tools like ADUC, Exchange Management Console (EMC), and Office 365’s administrative interface. ManageEngine ADManager Plus is a single solution that provides a layer of automation, consistency, and ease-of-use that makes every administrative task simple, thorough, and accurate. ADManager Plus is optimized for AD, Exchange, and Office 365, and provides a single action task execution that solves the issues of the hybrid AD environment, saving a significant amount of time and lowering the opportunity for user error.
When forced to rely on manual processes, organizations struggling with managing the intricacies of a hybrid AD environment often find themselves doing the best they can, with little thought on how it should be done. With impatient users demanding immediate results, tools with limited capabilities that are difficult to use are often the culprit behind synchronization errors or error-prone provisioning. Typical areas of inconsistency for the hybrid AD environment are in granting appropriate group membership with a job role in both AD and Office 365, assigning correct permissions to individual users, and designing processes for routine tasks.
ADManager Plus offers intelligent customizable templates that help you streamline and secure the administration of your hybrid AD environment. These templates include everything from provisioning actions in AD, Exchange, Office 365, Google Workspace, and Skype for Business; assigning users to groups; assigning Office 365 licenses; and so on.
Much of the management burden is from user provisioning. This involves setting up accounts in the directory, placing people in the correct groups, and making sure they have access the proper accounts and access to all the necessary applications, such as Exchange, Google Workspace, and Office 365. Setting up the accounts is one thing, but deprovisioning is another and perhaps more important. After all, the risk associated with a terminated employee retaining access is extremely high, but easily avoidable with the right tools. As discussed earlier, native tools simply don’t cut it when it comes to provisioning and deprovisioning. Setting up on-premises access requires the use of ADUC for AD, a different interface and process for Exchange, another for Skype for Business, etc.
There are a number of challenges with provisioning/reprovisioning/deprovisioning in the hybrid AD environment. IT admins have to use multiple native tools, which could potentially lead to errors and inconsistency. Users may experience long periods of inactivity and non-productivity waiting for access to be granted. The delays in deprovisioning or reprovisioning introduces risk as inappropriate access may be retained long after it should be terminated. The bottom line is: if you can’t get provisioning right, you can’t be confident in the security or efficiency of your hybrid AD environment.
So how do you get provisioning right? To start, eliminating as much potential for human error is key. Using a single tool that provides thorough provisioning (and deprovisioning) is the way to go. Through the use of automation, ADManager Plus streamlines the hybrid AD provisioning process to a single action, including in AD, Exchange, Office 365, Skype for Business, and so on. But it doesn’t stop there. ADManager Plus also draws from data sources, such as a human resource information system (HRIS) like Workday, Zoho People, UltiPro, and BambooHR to automatically execute end-to-end provisioning and deprovisioning across the entire hybrid AD environment.
Making changes in AD permissions without having them reviewed first can unintentionally expose sensitive business data to security vulnerabilities. It's essential to have an access control policy in place for every critical action in AD to prevent users from gaining unauthorized privileges. The best course of action is to follow a review process where every user change request is evaluated by a manager before it's transferred to an IT admin. Each request, such as access to critical shares or changes to group membership, must be reviewed by an IT manager or team lead to ensure that enterprise resources are not compromised.
ADManager Plus provides customizable business workflows necessary to ensure that users are granted appropriate rights and placed in the correct groups, along with all the approvals and audit trails to reduce risk. If it’s easy to grant people correct rights and consequently revoke rights when necessary, it’s easy to keep AD clean.
The glaring security gap in native AD management tools is the lack of proper granting of access rights to all IT admins. With native tools, an administrator account is required to do any action, such as provisioning a user, placing people in groups, or resetting a password. This also means that a number of people share the credential, and that everyone uses the same administrator login info with access to everything. This situation is fraught with risk due to a complete lack of individual accountability for the admin account.
The correct way to issue admin rights in a hybrid AD environment is to grant privileged users only enough permission to do their job–nothing more, nothing less. This is a concept called least privilege access. ADManager Plus provides a least privilege layer of security for AD with which you can manage what individual technicians are allowed to do and not allowed to do. It removes the potential for individuals to inadvertently or maliciously take actions beyond their role and responsibility.
With ADManager Plus, you have a single tool that enables you to define administrative roles across AD, Office 365, Exchange, and so on. The admin tasked with resetting passwords can only reset passwords; the provisioning technician can’t access or view license reports, thus introducing an additional layer of control and security around the hybrid AD environments.