Active Directory Policies

Using groups for access to shared drives and resources

October 17, 2025
Shared drives and file shares look simple on the surface: “give Finance access to \\FS1\Finance.” In reality, they become one of the fastest-growing sources of permission sprawl, audit pain, and accidental overexposure—especially in environments with multiple file servers, legacy shares, and hybrid identity. The most reliable way to keep access stable over…
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Handling expansion and consolidation of OUs during M&A

October 17, 2025
Handling expansion and consolidation of OUs during M&A Mergers and acquisitions are where “good enough” Active Directory design gets stress-tested. Organizational Units (OUs) sit right at the fault line: they encode administration boundaries, policy application, onboarding/offboarding workflows, and sometimes a company’s entire way of thinking about…
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Active Directory Policies

How to use OU structure to mirror organizational hierarchy

October 17, 2025
Using OU structure to mirror organizational hierarchy Organizational Units (OUs) feel like the “obvious” place to represent how a company is shaped: divisions, departments, regions, and teams. In Active Directory, that instinct is half right and half dangerous. The part that’s right: a good OU design makes administration predictable, delegation…
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Active Directory Policies

How to secure OU and group changes with audit trails

October 17, 2025
Securing OU and group changes with audit trails Organizational Units (OUs) and security groups are two of the most powerful “control surfaces” in Active Directory. OUs decide where objects live, what policies apply, who can administer what, and how delegation is structured. Groups decide who can access what (file shares, apps, GPO filtering…
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Active Directory Policies

Role-based access control (RBAC) using AD groups

October 17, 2025
Role-based access control (RBAC) using AD groups Role-based access control (RBAC) is the idea that people don’t get permissions because of who they are, but because of what they do. In Windows environments, Active Directory (AD) groups are the most common “glue” used to map job roles to permissions across file shares, apps, databases…
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Active Directory Policies

Using groups for licensing control in Microsoft 365

October 17, 2025
If you’re still assigning Microsoft 365 licenses user-by-user, you’re doing identity operations the hard way. Group-based licensing flips the model: instead of asking “What does Alice need?”, you decide “What does a Sales Analyst get?” and make group membership the single source of truth for licensing. This approach scales, reduces mistakes (missing…
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Active Directory Policies

AD group expiration and recertification best practices

October 17, 2025
AD group expiration and recertification best practices Active Directory groups are one of the most powerful—and most quietly dangerous—access control primitives in Windows environments. They’re easy to create, easy to nest, and easy to forget. The result is predictable: groups that outlive their projects, privileged memberships that never…
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Active Directory Policies

Mapping users to OUs via dynamic properties

October 17, 2025
Mapping users to OUs via dynamic properties Active Directory (AD) works best when Organizational Units (OUs) reflect how you operate: how you delegate, how you apply policy, and how you lifecycle identities. The problem is that people and org charts don’t stay still. Departments rename, locations split, teams merge, contractors come and go…
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Active Directory Policies

Tools for visualizing OU and group structures

October 17, 2025
Tools for visualizing OU and group structures Active Directory gets difficult to reason about long before it gets “big.” A few years of organic growth—new teams, acquisitions, hybrid identity, app-specific groups, delegated admins—turns OUs into a maze and groups into a web. The hard part isn’t knowing what an OU or a security group is.
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