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Despite the popularity of the cloud, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) remains a crucial component of the IT infrastructure for many organizations. Indeed, Active Directory often serves as the central identity repository and provides vital authentication and authorization services — so keeping it clean and well organized is vital.
Discover exactly why regular AD cleanup is critical — and the key signs of a poorly maintained AD environment. Then get valuable tips for cleaning up your Active Directory and learn about a solution that can help.
Active Directory (AD) is a Windows service that manages permissions and resources in a network. Over time, AD can get cluttered with obsolete user accounts, groups, or other objects. Cleaning up your Active Directory is essential for security and efficient management. Below is a straightforward guide on how to clean up your Active Directory:
1. Audit Your Current AD Setup
- What it means: Before you start cleaning, know what’s in your Active Directory.
- Details: Use built-in AD tools like “Active Directory Users and Computers” or third-party applications to generate reports. This will show you outdated accounts, unused groups, and more.
2. Remove Obsolete Users
- What it means: Delete accounts of employees who’ve left or changed roles.
- Details: Regularly review and remove user accounts that are no longer active. If someone hasn’t logged in for several months, it’s a sign their account might be obsolete.
3. Handle Stale Computer Accounts
- What it means: Computers, like users, have accounts. Clean these up too.
- Details: If a computer hasn’t connected to the network for a while, its AD account is probably stale. Consider removing or disabling these accounts.
4. Tidy Up Empty Groups
- What it means: Sometimes groups have no members. These are useless.
- Details: Groups in AD help manage permissions. If they have no members, they serve no purpose. Identify and delete these.
5. Update Group Memberships
- What it means: Ensure the right people have access to the right resources.
- Details: Regularly review group members. Remove members who don’t need access and add those who do.
6. Check Organizational Units (OUs)
- What it means: OUs are containers for AD objects. Ensure they’re organized.
- Details: Remove empty OUs or those that no longer reflect your organization’s structure. Rename, restructure, or move OUs to make the AD layout logical.
7. Review and Update Permissions
- What it means: Ensure only the right people have access to sensitive data.
- Details: Periodically review permissions on folders, files, and other resources. Tighten up any that are too loose and ensure people have the minimum permissions they need to do their job.
8. Backup Before Making Changes
- What it means: Always have a backup in case something goes wrong.
- Details: Before making significant changes, backup AD. This ensures you can restore it if there are issues.
9. Implement a Naming Convention
- What it means: Have a consistent way of naming AD objects.
- Details: Use a clear naming convention for users, computers, and groups. It makes management easier and ensures you can quickly identify the purpose of an object.
10. Set Up a Regular Review Process
- What it means: Cleaning shouldn’t be a one-time thing.
- Details: Schedule regular AD reviews. It’ll help you stay on top of things and ensure your AD remains clean and efficient.
11. Monitor for Inactive Accounts
- What it means: Watch out for accounts that aren’t being used.
- Details: Use monitoring tools to flag accounts that haven’t been used for a predefined period. It helps in identifying potential security risks.
12. Document Everything
- What it means: Keep a record of what you do in AD.
- Details: Documentation helps if issues arise and makes it easier for others to understand the AD setup. Whenever you make changes, update the documentation.
Benefits of a Clean Active Directory
Active Directory is the central repository for user accounts, computer accounts, server objects, Group Policy objects and other important information. But the AD database can become cluttered and fragmented over time as users join and leave the organization, computer hardware is refreshed, Windows Server is updated on domain controllers, and other changes are made. By cleaning up your AD, you can improve all of the following:
- Performance — Changes to the Active Directory database are constantly being replicated among your multiple domain controllers, and a bloated AD creates unnecessary replication traffic. It can take longer to authenticate users, search for AD objects and download Group Policy objects. Cleaning up your AD regularly helps these processes perform optimally.
- Security — Threat actors often seek to gain access to networks by taking over Active Directory user accounts of former employees that were never deleted. Regularly removing unused accounts shuts off this attack path.
- Compliance — Many regulatory mandates require organizations to implement strong controls over user identities. Regular Active Directory cleanup can help your organization achieve and prove compliance with these provisions.
- IT operations — A cluttered AD makes management much harder for administrators. By cleaning it, you can reduce the time they have to spend supporting it, giving them more time for strategic initiatives.
- Business agility — Mergers and acquisitions often involve consolidating Active Directory environments, often on a tight schedule. Meeting those deadlines is much easier when AD is clean and organized. More broadly, AD cleanup simplifies the job of adding new applications, updating workflows and making other changes to drive the business forward.
Signs of a Poorly Maintained Active Directory
Signs of a poorly maintained AD environment include the following:
- Stale, duplicate or orphaned user accounts
- Empty or duplicate security and distribution groups
- Little insight into security group access permissions
- Lack of an established process for provisioning and de-provisioning accounts
- Inability to determine ownership of objects and groups
- Inaccurate or incomplete object attribute details
How to Clean Up Active Directory
The following best practices can help you clean up your Active Directory:
- Regularly identify stale, disabled, inactive and orphaned user accounts — Adversaries look for unused Active Directory user accounts they can compromise in order to gain access to sensitive data. Some AD management products not only identify risky AD user accounts but provide customizable workflows that can automatically move them to a staging OU so you can review the impact of deleting them individually or in bulk.
- Identify duplicate user accounts — Users can end up with multiple accounts after changing roles within the organization, especially if you have multiple AD domains. Cleaning up these duplicate accounts can reduce complexity and confusion that can lead to security risks associated with overprovisioning.
- Ensure user account attributes are complete and accurate — Active Directory cleanup is about more than just deleting objects. It’s also about ensuring that your AD objects are properly populated with all the information required for proper account management. Be sure to perform metadata cleanup as well.
- Leverage historical SIDS — Eliminate token bloat and broken access control by identifying and cleaning up historical SIDS to improve performance.
- Identify expired passwords — Identify Active Directory accounts with expired passwords, since they can indicate that the account is infrequently used or inactive. Settings
- Find empty, duplicate and circularly nested groups — Identify and remove empty or duplicate AD groups that serve no purpose. Solutions like Netwrix Active Directory Security Solution can also identify and help you remediate circularly nested groups that hinder AD performance.
- Review security groups with large membership — While some security groups, such as Everyone, are meant to be large, most security groups should be much smaller. Make sure each group includes only the users who need the resource access that the group provides.
- Clean up mail-enabled groups — Distribution lists and mail-enabled security groups often become bloated over time because their owners fail to keep them up to date. Make sure your solution can identify these groups and help you clean them up.
- Ensure each group has an owner and require regular attestation — Each group should have an owner who is required to regularly attest that the group is still needed and that it has the correct permissions and membership.
