In the modern workforce, we can work from home – or from any location that has internet access – more easily than ever. We often interact and comment on social media as individuals as part of our professional lives. Where we log in from, how we access resources and the devices we use are interchangeable and blur the line between these two formerly distinct parts of life.

As an individual, it’s professionally liberating but for IT managers and CISOs, this extended environment includes far too many access points that bad actors can use to get to the precious corporate resources. This situation mandates a comprehensive change in our approach security. The balance that IT managers and CISOs work to achieve is to give their users safe access without heavy-handed security measures impeding productivity. They must consider many factors and weigh options as to how they can safely support the business in reaching its objectives. The aim is to secure the enterprise without users noticing. In a word, to make security frictionless to the user.

Active Directory is everywhere and Azure Active Directory (AAD), its cloud-based cousin, is quickly gaining ground. Currently, nearly ninety percent of organizations worldwide are using Active Directory (AD) for on-premises resources (aka on-prem). That represents 500 million organizations and somewhere around 10 billion daily authentications. In fact, in the world of identity and access management (IAM), AD has become unavoidable and absolutely necessary for on-prem user authentication and authorization. You have to go through AD. It’s just how it’s done. Now, mix in the cloud – and Azure AD– and your management complexity just skyrocketed – and you could be in for a world of pain, if your on-prem or cloud identity environments are not managed and synched properly.

One of the fastest growing segments of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) market is the cloud segment. Increasingly, companies are choosing to move at least part of their security infrastructure to cloud-based solutions. Even if you still run critical IAM service on-prem, there’s a great chance you manage and integrate with cloud applications.

Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) administration and management includes 12 major tasks. These tasks cover a wide breadth of business needs and are not all performed solely by AD DS administrators. In fact, administrators can and should delegate several tasks to other members of their technical community, technicians, help desk personnel, even users such as team managers and administrative assistants. While delegation is a way to reduce the amount of work administrators have to do when managing AD DS infrastructures, it really only addresses one or two of the 12 tasks, for example, user and group administration as well as end point device administration. The other ten tasks can be staggering in nature — security, networked service administration, OU-Specific Management, Group Policy Object management and many more — and because of this can take up inordinate amounts of time. You can rely on Microsoft’s built-in tools to reduce some of this workload, but are the native tools enough? Perhaps it’s time to reduce AD DS administration overhead by automating most tasks and tightening internal security. Address this by first, determining what the twelve essential labors of Active Directory are and then, see how you can reduce AD DS workloads through the implementation of proper management and administration tools.