GPO Fundamentals

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

Group cleanup scripts with usage analysis Active Directory group sprawl is not just “messy directory hygiene”—it directly affects access risk, troubleshooting time, audit outcomes, and even authentication performance at scale. The hard part isn’t deleting groups; it’s proving that a group is no longer needed, and doing it without…

Detecting privileged group membership changes Privileged group membership is one of the highest-leverage control points in Active Directory. If an attacker can add an account (or a computer, service principal, or nested group) to a privileged group, they often don’t need a “loud” exploit anymore—access becomes legitimate by definition.

How to sync AD groups to cloud services securely Syncing Active Directory (AD) groups to cloud services sounds simple: “make the same groups appear in the cloud.” In practice, it’s one of the easiest ways to accidentally leak access, expand blast radius, or create hard-to-audit privilege paths across environments. This guide walks through the…