Posts by Clint Wyckoff

In Part 1, Protecting the Active Directory Domain Services – Best Practices for AD administration, I focused on protection steps to protect your domain service locally. Unfortunately, most environments have multiple locations, otherwise known as ROBOs (Remote Office Branch Offices). Examples include remote, colocation and cloud data centers, retail stores, satellite offices, distribution centers, manufacturing plants and more. These locations are often geographically separated by many hundreds or thousands of miles, require only simple file, print and share services and are often without an IT staff. Server virtualization has drastically improved the way these services are deployed.

Every component of the Modern Data Center requires authentication of some form or fashion.  Microsoft's Active Directory Services contains information about individual objects within the forest and stores the necessary information in a relational database (ntds.dit). Domain Controllers are the heads of the infrastructure that controls access to resources through an authentication and login process. When a user attempts to access a file on the corporate domain-based file server, either. Kerberos and NTLM are authentication protocols used to verify the identity of a computer or user. To say the least, authentication is critical to the Always-On Business.