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Top 5 Reasons Small Businesses Should Invest in Active Directory Services
January 27, 2025
Every time an employee clicks, scrolls, or swipes, the security of an SMB teeters on the brink! How can businesses navigate this ever-shifting digital terrain while also focusing on business growth?
Revenue in the IT services and solutions market across the globe is expected to reach $1,114 billion while growing at a CAGR of 7.10%. Unlike the preceding 20 years, where large enterprises drove IT spending, this growth is driven by the growing adoption of IT solutions by small businesses.
One indispensable solution for small business IT is Active Directory. Designed to simplify and centralize IT management, AD enables small businesses to maintain a secure, organized, and efficient data environment. Whether it’s managing users, devices, permissions, or policies, Active Directory services offer capabilities that are crucial for any business aiming to scale while also safeguarding its data and meeting regulatory compliance.
In this blog, we will look at the top 5 reasons why businesses should use Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS), how it benefits SMBs, and explain Uplevel Systems' Active Directory Compatible Domain Services.
Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) simplifies a variety of tasks: user authentication, workstation admission to the network, access to network resources, and uniform policy management. AD DS organizes resources ("objects") into a structured hierarchy, simplifying the task of IT managers when compartmentalizing groups of users and enforcing security policies.
The AD DS hierarchy comprises the following components:
1) Domains: A domain is merely a collection of "objects," such as users, workstations, or scripts.
2) Organizational Units (OUs): These are subdivisions within a domain used to group
objects. For example, all the accounting users could be grouped into a single "Accounting" OU, and the same policies enforced across all.
3) Trees and Forests: For larger organizations, there may be multiple domains arranged in a logical structure, interconnected through "trust relationships.". In the very largest of organizations (think Bank of America), multiple trees are joined into a forest, similarly linked by "trust relationships.". For small businesses, however, there is usually only a single forest with a single tree containing a single domain.
One of the largest single sources of security weaknesses is employee moves, adds, and changes. Ideally, groups of employees should be compartmentalized and only allowed to access data and resources that they absolutely need. So, for example, access to the accounting database and SQL server should be limited to accountants. But what happens when an accountant leaves and is replaced by another? The constant need to update and remove employee access restrictions is not only expensive but also time-consuming and frustrating for the SMB. This leads most SMBs to forgo all controls whatsoever, opening them up to security violations.
With AD DS, all you would do would be to create a single accounting group, assign the proper policies to the group, and then put all the accountants into it. When an accountant leaves, simply remove him/her from the group; when a new one joins, add him/her to it. There is no need to touch individual users or even to remember what to change!
Many compliance regimes (HIPAA, CMMC, FINRA) require positive control of what devices have access to which resources. It is not sufficient to merely know the password; you also have to be accessing that data from an authorized device. AD makes this trivial. In the above example, simply ensure that only Accounting workstations are added to the Accounting group and can access the Accounting database and SQL server. Then some temp worker from the loading dock who grabs a username and password from a sticky note will not be able to gain access, because his or her device is not permitted to access the data.
With positive authentication and control of both users and workstations, IT admins can impose security policies that are much finer-grained than simple username/password access to shares. Want to grant an accounting user read-only access to a specific folder on the CEO's share? Easy. Add that specific user to the access permissions for the folder using your administrative account, and that user (and only that user) can see those files.
Many applications and devices are designed to work with AD authentication. For example, tax software can make use of the user's initial workstation login to remove the need to additionally log into the tax software database. This greatly streamlines the employees' work and ensures that only those who need it can access critical customer data.
By centralizing user and resource management and enabling them to be done without access to the users' devices or workstations, AD minimizes the time and effort required for administrative tasks. For instance, automating user account provisioning can lead to substantial annual savings.
Active Directory obviously provides a great deal of streamlining and efficiency. But small businesses often struggle with the high costs of accomplishing this. Typically, installing an AD DS setup requires a dedicated server with a fairly complex and expensive installation of an AD DS software application such as Windows Server. The costs just begin there: the server needs to be fairly robust and bulletproof, because the whole business will come to a halt if it fails; the licenses need to be kept up to date; and the system needs to be backed up and monitored at regular intervals. There is also much housekeeping and maintenance involved. All this is quite daunting for a 10-person business, not to mention the steep learning curve required.
Uplevel Systems addresses this by integrating a fully functional on-premises Active Directory-compatible Domain Controller directly into its gateways and providing a simple, easy-to-use, low-learning-curve user interface into it. This domain controller is enhanced with cloud intelligence to handle all of the typical management, monitoring, and maintenance tasks (e.g., backups of the domain database are automatic and continuous), making it simple and efficient for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to deploy. Additionally, the Uplevel Domain Controller supports advanced policy management (GPOs), offering the same robust user and security management features as standard Windows AD servers. MSPs can implement centralized policies to ensure consistency and security across all devices for the smallest of businesses!
NOTE: Special Offer: Contact us today to enjoy the first month of AD-LITE service free of charge and experience the full benefits of centralized authentication and policy management at no cost!
