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Active Directory : Design Considerations and Best Practices

Active Directory (AD) is one of the most critical components of any IT infrastructure. In a Windows-based environment, almost all the applications and tools are integrated with Active Directory for authentication, directory browsing, and single sign-on. An outage in Active Directory can stall the entire IT operations of an organization.

Due to this criticality, the first priority of an AD Admin is to ensure the stability, availability, and security of the Active Directory environment.

In this article, we will discuss some of the design considerations and best practices which would keep your AD environment healthy and stable.

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Azure Key Vault : Overview

Security is one of the biggest concerns for any organization, and with the advent of Cloud Computing and Hybrid Infrastructure; Security is probably the biggest concern. A breach is security and compliance can impact organizations reputation, business and it can also invoke legal issues.

One of the major aspects of security is managing credentials. Every organization needs to manage a few hundreds or thousands of credentials, which include Passwords, Encryption keys, Connection Strings, Digital Certificates, etc.

In many organizations, this sensitive information is not managed properly. Some of the examples are:

Passwords are not stored in a central repository and are often hard-coded within program.
Database connection strings are hard-coded within the program.
When an employee leaves the organization who knows many critical passwords and secrets, it is difficult to change those as they are not centrally managed.
In the case of any security incident, response time becomes higher as there is no central place to monitor and troubleshoot.
The auto-renew policy is not configured for digital certificates, which often leads to outages related to an expired certificate. This also spoils organizations reputation and brand value.

The goal is to store all credentials in a secure repository, from where we can manage those through a single console.

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Introduction to Azure Managed Identities

Introduction

Security is one of the biggest concerns for any organization, and with the advent of Cloud Computing and Hybrid Infrastructure, it has become more critical than ever. A breach in security and compliance can severely impact business operations, reputation, and may even lead to legal consequences.

Managing credentials, keys, and secrets is an important aspect of cloud security. Azure provides a managed service called Key Vault to store these securely—but how do we manage authentication to access the Key Vault?

Microsoft has extended the centralized identity model from its on-premises products (like Windows Server, SQL Server) to the cloud via Azure Active Directory. Today, many Azure services support Azure AD authentication—and this list is growing.

Disclaimers:

1. This article may become outdated over time due to rapid updates in Azure. Please check official Microsoft documentation before implementation.
2. Test thoroughly in non-production environments. This content is provided as-is and should be used at your own discretion.

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