Need to Tame Your Active Directory Beast? Automate!

Featured article by Dayna Delmonico, Publisher of EssentialTech and TekDigest

Back in 1999, when Active Directory (AD) was introduced with Microsoft’s Windows 2000, “single-sign-on” and the “emerging Enterprise” were the hottest topics in technology. Since then, Active Directory has morphed into the main source of access, authentication and backbone of infrastructure and applications in Windows environments around the world. An estimated 95% of the Fortune 1000 use AD.

If you have any experience with Active Directory you know what a beast it can be to administrate and manage. In a 2015 survey of IT professionals* 100% of respondents agreed that AD is “business critical”, but 43% percent of respondents said managing routine things like user adds, moves and changes were still challenges.

Active Directory native tools have been woefully inadequate for many administrators, so an army of vendors responded with tools for every conceivable situation, from single provisioning software to sophisticated suites. For automating AD tasks, even daily routine tasks, barely a handful of 3^rd party solutions exist.

Automate — Native vs. Solutions

Active Directory is ripe for automation and a popular topic with IT according to Eric Blum, Fortune 500 IT Manager and contributor at ITSMdaily. “One of the problems every IT department will face, have faced or is now facing is that companies have cut budgets for IT, in turn, IT staff have less time and need a way to automate as much as possible.”

To decrease IT workload, manual and native automation tools may not be a satisfying answer for your environment, however. “Active Directory management is a complex activity that every company of a reasonable size has to undergo. With just Active Directory you get a basis that you work with and some other very basic tools to control it,”according to Artem Chukanov, CEO of Softerra. Theresa Miller of 24×7 IT Connection, finds native tools“… often very time consuming to implement and typically require additional rework with each future Active Directory Upgrade.”

In addition, Joseph Moody of deployhappiness adds that native tools like Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) are showing some age. “Little annoyances include never remembering any setting that you check up to the lack of real customization. Bigger issues include no granular built-in roles (which most other Microsoft products include) and a need to use multiple solutions for simple automation,” Moody points out. Consultant and blogger Adam Fowler says single solution tools, “… required you to write your own code (PowerShell, .NET) and use what I’d call strange variable calls, instead of plain old nice code. To me, you have to wear a developer hat… for anything beyond very basic workflows.”

Full AD management and automation solutions solve most of those concerns, but according to Anton Pozdnyakov CMO for Softerra, “If you are looking for solutions that provide a full automation cycle for user provisioning and that are scalable to fit the needs of most environments, there definitely aren’t many to choose from.” The most well-known, DellActiveRoles, originally part of Dell’s Quest Software acquisition, is being acquired by equity firm Francisco Partners and Elliott Management along with all of the current software offerings from Dell Software. For mid- to large-scale enterprise environments along with Dell ActiveRoles and Softerra’s Adaxes, ManageEngine ADManager Plus and Tools4ever UMRA are the most familiar solutions.

A Different Approach

Of those available solutions Moody says, Softerra “Adaxes takes a different approach. If I had to bet,” says Moody, “the developers of Adaxes were Active Directory administrators that got tired of being inefficient. “ (Click here for Joseph Moody’s Review)

A full AD management and administration solution, Adaxes not only adds a layer between Active Directory and its users (admins, helpdesks, managers, etc.) that automates a lot of routine things, like creating and setting up a new user accounts or automating group membership management but solves some major AD pain points like moving to role-based access control. Softerra’s Chukanov likes to think of it as giving his customers a car when they only had a bicycle. They can cover a lot of AD administrative ground with very little effort. ” We understand the problems that IT departments face every day, so with Adaxes we are giving them actual solutions to those problems instead of giving them just a basic toolset to figure it out themselves.”

Adaxes even includes an impressive PowerShell module. Eugene Pavlov, Adaxes Product Manager explains, “Adaxes fully supports custom scripting instead of restricting flexibility. If there is a specific problem that needs a custom solution, users can just write their own script and it will blend in into all automation workflows.”

So if you have an AD monster on your hands or are implementing automation for Active Directory you can give Adaxes a try and Download a 30-day free trial or view a live Demo. (Click here for a Review of Adaxes’ Exchange features by MSExchange.org)

* Dimensional Research2015 IT Professional Survey