Max Wertheimer, the founder of the Gestalt Theory, once stated in a borrowed and commonly referenced Aristotle philosophy that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This means that when one thing is grouped with multiple properties, it becomes stronger and can provide more value than it could alone. This concept directly applies to Active Directory, which is a database that connects users in an organization to the network resources, so that they can conveniently perform their assigned tasks.
Why Automate Active Directory Tasks?
Active Directory is a powerful tool that controls much of the activity that goes around in the IT department (and in the organization at large). It’s increased significance in managing the IAM infrastructure for companies, particularly around user and group management, has led towards various use case requirements that are not always fulfilled by its native features. Some of the widely recognized limitations pertaining to user and group management in Active Directory are:
- Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) does not allow you to create users in bulk unless you use PowerShell and know the right commandlets.
- You cannot add user properties automatically in ADUC, and performing such tasks manually costs you several hours of productivity to complete the job.
- ADUC does not enable you to expire groups. So, if you delete a group from Active Directory, there is no way to recover its membership and policies.
One of the most logical ways to overcome these limitations is to automate user and group management tasks in Active Directory, leading to increased productivity for IT resources within companies. This is where GroupID, with its suite of modules focused on streamlining group and user management in Active Directory, provides value to companies across the globe.
Enhance Active Directory Controls via GroupID
GroupID has helped over 500 companies around the globe to organize their Active Directory. By combining multiple GroupID modules, you gain greater benefits than what you would reap from them individually. That is why we say, one plus one is greater than two.
Here is how you can combine multiple modules of GroupID to enhance the controls of Active Directory in your organization:
- Automate and Self-Service
- Automate and Password Center
- Automate and Synchronize
- Synchronize and Self-Service
Automate and Self-Service Modules
GroupID Automate enables administrators to manage Active Directory groups, including static groups and Smart Groups. With Automate, administrators can:
- Create static groups, Smart groups, and Dynasties
- Manage the scope, type, security, and ownership of the groups
- Manage group membership dynamically
- Set expiration policies for groups
- Manage group life cycle
- Move groups between domains within a forest
The best way to manage these tasks is to delegate them to end-users while maintaining a stronghold on your directory via workflows and validation checks.
GroupID Self-Service allows administrators to delegate directory administration tasks to end-users through web-based portals. With Self-Service, end-users can:
- Search the directory
- Perform group management tasks, such as create and update their groups, join and leave groups, attest, expire and renew groups, and more.
- Carry out user management tasks, such as create, update, and delete users in the directory.
- Maintain and update their directory profiles, manage their direct reports, and more.
- View history data for directory objects that are created, updated, or deleted in the directory using GroupID.
End-users can easily perform these tasks without any assistance from IT administrators.
Automate and Delegate Group Management
By combining the Automate and Self-Service modules of GroupID, you can extend the power of groups in your directory as follows:
Automate
GroupID Automate introduces Smart Groups and Dynasties, that rely on user-defined queries for dynamic membership update.
Smart Groups are query-based groups and a group’s membership is determined by the LDAP query defined for it. Administrators can create both security groups and distribution lists as Smart Groups.
Automates converts this criterion into an LDAP query. It filters objects from the directory with that query and adds them to group membership.
Dynasties, in a nutshell, is group nesting on the fly. It enables you to create multi-level groups automatically based on the most common criteria (manager, organization, geographical location, etc.).
So, when directory information changes, Automate automatically updates the relevant group memberships, thus ensuring that groups are never out of date. This allows administrators to easily maintain large groups without having to manually add and remove members.
Self-Service
With Self-Service, end-users can update their directory profiles, thus updating AD attributes. Once those attributes are updated and reflected in AD, Automate uses them to update the user memberships based on relevant criteria.
Moreover, while administrators can create groups using Automate, end-users can choose to join and leave their preferred groups using Self-Service.
Group attestation is another great feature of GroupID Self-Service, which ensures that groups in Active Directory do not exist without a purpose. Group attestation requires owners to attest to their groups after a certain period to confirm the following:
- Groups are still in use
- Groups have the right memberships
- Groups are assigned the appropriate attributes
GroupID expires groups that are not attested and renewed by the group owner.
Automate and Password Center Modules
GroupID Password Center reduces the workload on IT administration and helpdesk by enabling them to delegate password reset and account unlock to end-users. Password Center web portals enables:
- End-users to unlock their account, change password, and reset password without raising a Helpdesk ticket.
- Helpdesk to perform account unlock and password reset operations on behalf of the end-users.
User Management via Automate and Password Center
When you combine Password Center with Automate, you can create password expiry distribution groups. The membership of a password expiry group is limited to users whose identity store account passwords are approaching their expiry dates. GroupID generates email notifications to alert members to reset their passwords. These email notifications also redirect users to the Password Center portal, where they can instantly reset their password. On doing so, they are automatically removed from group membership.
Automate and Synchronize Modules
GroupID Synchronize is a synchronization engine for reflecting the changes in user data from one data source to another. You can create jobs to synchronize multiple sources while defining how the data is related and how the data should flow from the source to the destination.
User Provisioning & Deprovisioning via Automate and Synchronize
By combining GroupID Synchronize with Automate, you can significantly improve the process of onboarding users, managing object attributes in Active Directory to reflect the latest information, automatically adding and removing users from group memberships based on updated attributes, and finally, offboarding the users when they leave the organization.
Once users are provisioned in AD through a Synchronize job and user attributes are updated within AD, Automate leverages this information to ensure that users are automatically added to the membership of relevant groups.
Moreover, a Synchronize job can take the update snapshot of data within AD and use it to reflect updated changes across other directories and databases within the environment.
Synchronize and Self-Service Modules
By merging together GroupID Synchronize and Self-Service, you can maintain a directory that is always up to date. Users that are provisioned through Synchronize can access the Self-Service portal to update their directory profiles.
With Synchronize’s capability to run synchronization jobs, users who update their profiles via the GroupID Self-Service portal can then have their data updated across other directories and databases.
User Deprovisioning via Synchronize and Self-Service
Self-Service enforces profile validation for end-users after every X days to ensure that they are still working actively within the company. GroupID informs users via email notifications that their profile validation is due within X number of days. If a user fails to validate the profile within the set-duration, their account will be disabled. Utilizing the same criteria, such disabled users are removed from relevant group memberships and are deprovisioned from the directory. Then a Synchronize job uses that as reference to reflect the same deprovisioning across the network.
Conclusion
A leader in identity and access management, Imanami specializes in security groups and distribution lists automation in Active Directory. The company offers a variety of solutions to deal with Active Directory groups, so that organizations can enhance network security and mitigate the risk of both outsider and insider attacks.
If you already own a GroupID module, contact one of our friendly account representatives to book a demo of these modules working together.
Jonathan Blackwell
View ProfileSince 2012, Jonathan Blackwell, an engineer and innovator, has provided engineering leadership that has put GroupID at the forefront of group and user management for Active Directory and Azure AD environments. His experience in development, marketing, and sales allows Jonathan to fully understand the Identity market and how buyers think.