Active Directory
Active Directory is Microsoft's mainstream directory services technology. It is the heart of your organisations network administration and security, and essentially provides a single, central, authoritative record of your IT users, servers and services.
Active Directory has matured into a world standard technology and features additional capabilities such as:
- Information security and single sign-on for user access to networked resources
- The ability to scale up or down easily
- Standardizing access to application data
- Synchronization of directory updates across servers
Active Directory stores all information and settings for a deployment in a central database. Active Directory allows administrators to assign policies, deploy and update software. Active Directory networks can vary from a small installation with a few computers, users and printers to tens of thousands of users, many different network domains spanning different geographical locations.
Emantra can provide two types of Active Directory service to your organisation. Emantra's Hosted Active Directory is a service whereby your on-site parent Active Directory server replicates in real time against the remote hosted server. This provides benefits including off-site back-up of critical AD data, redundancy against on-site Active Directory downtime (in which event users would otherwise be denied access to your system), and the ability at Emantra's end to give your users single-sign-on access to your hosted applications. Single sign on means users don't have to continually re-authenticate as they switch applications.
Emantra's Managed Active Directory service is similar however in this case the parent Active Directory server itself is hosted by Emantra and the on-site AD servers, of which there may be many in many different locations, replicate against that single authoritative service. In this way, users or services added, deleted or changed in one location will be immediately visible and effective in all other connected locations. Emantra will mange and monitor the connections required.
