Creating an Active Directory

Creating Active Directory for Riordan

Riordan Manufacturing is an international organization with three plants located in the United States and one in China. With its organizational resources spread out all over the world streamlining its communications and daily operations is vital. This communication is not only vital internally with each plant but globally between all of the plants. Communication break downs not only slow down production but cost the organization valuable revenue. Active Directory helps streamline this communication. It does this by making tasks less complex and universal in the organization.

The Active Directory is setup as a resource. Its main job is to identify resources within the organization and on its network. It also allows for the network to be accessible by multiple users within the organization. Along those same lines it also provides security by only allowing users to access the information allowed by their permission level. The resources Active Directory controls are email, work stations, printers, hubs, servers, and objects that will help users to complete their jobs efficiently.

Active directory also assists with authentication. Authentication is done by using username/password combinations along with Kerberos. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol that uses cryptography and allows users to prove their identity to the server. These authentication processes provide another layer of security and help in the permissions process. This process ensures that users are authorized employees. It also helps define the user and group they are assigned. This in turn sets the permission level and what information that user is allowed to obtain, read, write, or make changes to.

The first step is planning out Active Directory for the organization. One of the keys to planning an Active Directory design is keeping domains to a minimum when possible. San Jose California is Riordan’s corporate headquarters making it the logical...