For IT leaders
Most enterprises still depend on Active Directory; tiering, hardening, and recovery readiness directly determine ransomware blast radius.
Why IT teams care
Where this shows up at the team level
- AD is still the source of truth for many enterprises even with Entra ID in front of it.
- Tier 0 hardening, privileged access workstations, and AD recovery are recurring engagements.
- Hybrid identity with Entra Connect requires steady operational care.
In production
Where teams encounter it
- Domain controllers running AD DS in on-prem and hybrid environments
- Group Policy applied to users and computers
- Hybrid-identity sync to Microsoft Entra (Azure AD)
How it works
How Active Directory actually works
- 01Domain controllers host the AD database, replicate it among themselves, and authenticate users and computers.
- 02Objects (users, groups, computers, OUs) are organized in a hierarchy that mirrors how the organization manages them.
- 03Permissions on resources are checked against group memberships in AD using Kerberos and NTLM.
- 04Group Policy delivers configuration to domain-joined machines based on user and computer location in the OU tree.
In practice
Common team use cases
- Single sign-on inside the corporate network for Windows resources
- Centralized configuration of Windows endpoints via Group Policy
- Hybrid identity feeding cloud apps via Entra ID
Build the capability
Related CBT Nuggets training
Each link routes to a hub that goes deeper than this definition.
Related concepts