Active Directory Automation: The Next Step toward the Brave New World?

IT is changing. Cloud services, whether public, private, or hybrid, introduce a new focus for operations teams. We are no longer fixated on building and maintaining infrastructure—we need to concentrate on automating management, delivering services, and developing future iterations of our systems to make the enterprise more capable, more agile, and more profitable. Even the …

Common Product Security Questions

When investigating the security of various products used on-site, in the cloud, or for clouds, I tend to ask the same set of questions. These focus on identity, compliance, logging, and the like. Specifically, I want to know how the product will integrate with security policy and requirements, as well as with other tools and …

Death to Active Directory? Is the Windows Domain Still Relevant in the Modern IT World?

In a meeting recently, I was quite taken aback to hear a reason given for not moving to 2012 R2 forest functional level—a reason to which I hadn’t previously been privy. The stated reason was, “in a few years, the Windows domain won’t be relevant anymore.” As someone who cut his IT teeth on Windows …