A few years ago, I was working on an Active Directory restructuring project for a world-famous pharmaceutical company. According to the company policies, I had to travel to their headquarters to perform the project tasks. So, on a rare sunny English morning, I walked into the company's reception area. After I explained who I was and why I was there, the receptionist handed me a set of forms to fill in. The forms included questions such as my name, phone number, how long I would be there, and in which department. Once I had completed the forms, I handed them over to the receptionist, and she had to make a few calls to verify whether my visit was expected, and then confirm my access to different buildings with the respective department managers. Then, she made a magnetic card with my details on it, and handed it over to me. She instructed...

Active Directory components can be divided into two main categories:

• Logical components
• Physical components

When you design your identity infrastructure, you need to consider both components. The logical components of the Active Directory structure can change at any given time according to business requirements. But you won't be able to modify the physical components as easily as the logical components. The placement of these components will define the efficiency, security, reliability, and manageability of your identity infrastructure. So, it's crucial that we get it right at the beginning, before we move on to advanced identity infrastructure planning.

If we need to describe a person or thing, we use different adjectives. This can include personality, ethnic background, physical appearance, or other characteristics. Most of these are not unique. For example, when you talk about a 6-foot-tall boy, there can be lots of 6-foot-tall boys in the city. But it still explains that the person that we're trying to describe is definitely not a girl. If we need to uniquely identify a person or thing, we need to identify some unique attributes associated with them. If it's a person, then their passport number, telephone number, or social security number will make it easier to uniquely identify them from others. If it's an object, the unique identifier could be the serial number or barcode.

Within an organization, there are many physical entities. These can be either employees or resources...

There are five main Active Directory server roles. These roles are grouped together in the required Active Directory environment, in order to set up and configure Active Directory server roles:

• Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS)
• Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS)
• Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
• Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
• Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS)

Since Windows Server 2008, these roles can be installed and configured using Windows Server Manager. It is the same in Windows Server 2016.

Each of these server roles can also be installed and configured using PowerShell. The following PowerShell cmdlets can be used to install Active Directory server roles:

Microsoft started their Azure journey back in 2008. Windows Azure was available to the public from 2010 (it was renamed as Microsoft Azure in 2014). Today it is a mature, industry-leading public cloud service. Its infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and SaaS offerings are well trusted by many different parties such as governments, Fortune 500 companies, militaries, universities, hospitals, service providers, and so on. Now, more than ever, businesses are moving their data, applications, and operations to Microsoft Azure; taking into consideration business growth, efficiency, experience, agility, cost, and assurance.

When businesses are looking to move existing data, applications, or operations to Azure, there are two paths to consider:

• Lift and shift: Existing servers and applications can shift to the cloud using methods such as replication...

This is the end of the introductory chapter on Active Directory fundamentals. I am sure most of you are already aware about most of the functions of AD DS. But refreshing your knowledge about Active Directory components and their operations before we dive deep into the advanced topics wasn't in vain. In this chapter, we also covered Active Directory objects, GUID and SID values, and DN. Later, I explained the Active Directory server roles and their core values. In this chapter, we also touched on an introduction to Azure AD and it is capabilities.

In the next chapter, you will learn about new features and enhancements to AD DS 2016, specifically about the new approach to protect identities from modern security threats.