Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Summary

Continuous monitoring and auditing is a must for an identity infrastructure to identify potential security threats and maintain a healthy environment. There are a lot of tools and methods out there to do this, but the success of these solutions depend on the accuracy of detection, the way it presents data, and how it helps identify the root cause.

In this chapter, we started with looking at Windows inbuilt tools and methods which we can use to monitor and audit Active Directory environments. First, we started with GUI tools and then moved to PowerShell-based auditing. Then we looked at Microsoft ATA and how it can help identify security threats in the infrastructure that cannot be detected using traditional tools and methods. Last but not least, we looked at the Microsoft cloud-based advanced monitoring and log analytics solution, OMS. Using a demo, I also explained how...