Is your organization struggling with multiple domains in Active Directory?
Is this becoming a pain to manage and making collaboration more challenging? Active Directories (AD) are the foundation of a company’s IT environment and while they can go unnoticed, maintaining multiple forests or directories can become a burden on administrators and make simple tasks with collaboration more difficult. Through Interlink’s Azure AD restructuring service and experience, this reorganization process can be streamlined; Interlink will do the work and offer the guidance needed.
Companies often need to consolidate Active Directories for one of three driving factors:
- Migrations & Acquisitions: When one company acquires another, consolidating ADs should be a top priority to ensure a cohesive, connected and branded environment
- Rebranding: The rebranding of a company can be critical to future success and a key component is having the new company name in front of the eyeballs of your employees
- Fixing the Structure: Companies may need to consolidate ADs if it was created incorrectly in the past or the business needs have evolved and need to change for effectiveness
Merging Active Directories can be tough because it requires a great deal of knowledge to correctly plan out the consolidation, and not to mention the complexity of renaming domain names. Our team has the knowledge, experience, and understanding of how to consolidate ADs correctly so that it is done in a timely manner while minimizing any disruption. For instance, there are some applications they can cause complications if they are migrated; certain applications need to be rebuilt in order to move them. Regardless of the complexity or problem, Interlink is available to answer these challenges.
What Could Go Wrong With Consolidating ADs?
- The consolidation was done too quickly or without understanding the best way to move applications, therefore it causes disruption to the applications that run the business daily
- There is corruption to legacy attributes that interfere with new upgrades such as AD synchronization or AD updates
- Old versions of AD can cause a lack of security and/or not serve the functionality that its needed to due to a lack of updates
How Can Interlink Help?
- Our experts have the experience to drive the consolidation of AD forests
- We have the experience with successfully merging active directories through our process:
- Assess the current environment including the networks and applications in use
- Determine the best strategy to move business applications while minimizing disruption
- Plan out the best process for the client, including selecting the necessary tool set
- Implement the plan and follow through mechanically or mentor client’s internal staff to complete the plan
- Understand the trade offs and costs of building new versus migrating versus leaving the tough applications in the old domain(s)
- Review user and admin roles and clean up terminated user accounts
- We ensure you avoid common, yet costly IT mistakes because our experts know how to properly configure:
- Windows Firewall
- DNS
- AD Physical Structure (Sites)
- AD Logical Structure (Forests/Trees/Domains/OUs)
- Group Policy for Security (Local/Global/Universal)
- Trust Relationships
- Make sure the parent companies’ systems can handle all the acquired companies’ needs and vice versa
What Interlink Will Do:
- Take care of the complicated stuff
- Offer guidance through the process
- General health assessment of AD
- Effectively organize the AD
A successful active directory consolidation will limit disruption to the business operations, diminish the pain for administrators and ultimately improve team collaboration. Get in touch with us today to get ahead of this opportunity and take advantage of our expertise and guidance. Interlink can also offer assistance to avoid other common M&A mistakes.